SUWON — At Suwon KT Wiz Park on the 3rd, the KT Wiz hosted the Hanwha Eagles. As the first inning ended with Hanwha leading 5-3, a lineup announcement rang out across the stadium to open the second inning. It was the voice of Park Su-mi, the park's public address announcer. Park has held the job for 10 years, since the KT Wiz played their first home game as a new franchise in 2015, and her crisp player introductions are regarded by fans as a signature of the ballpark.
But the announcement before the second inning that day did not come from Park. It came from artificial intelligence. KT synthesized Park's actual voice using KT TTS 2.0, the company's in-house text-to-speech technology. "TTS technology is no longer just about reading text aloud. It is advancing to the point where AI captures how something is spoken," said Park Jae-han, head of KT's Sound AI team. "Just as an actor adjusts a performance when a director asks for a certain delivery, KT TTS 2.0 can generate different voices for the same sentence depending on the instruction it is given."
For player introductions, the instruction might read: pause briefly after the position, stretch each syllable of the player's name long and strong, and raise the pitch on the final syllable. For routine announcements: read calmly and clearly, enunciating without exaggeration. "The AI voice was used at the stadium during my maternity leave in July and August, and neither fans nor players could tell whether the voice they heard was AI or real," Park said. "I thought the shouting in player introductions would be difficult for AI to reproduce, but it was remarkably close."
The AI seeping into the ballpark is not limited to announcements. KT said it introduced an AI facial recognition entry service at the stadium in time for the KT Wiz home opener in early April and upgraded services including real-time AI translation and AI-generated cheer signs.
The facial recognition entry service, now offered to 500 season-ticket holders, has been particularly effective against ticket scalping and entry delays, KT said. "The existing facial recognition gates took about 50 to 60 seconds per person, including bag checks, and AI cut that by roughly 30 seconds while easing entry delays by more than 50%," a KT official said. On the day of the game, the system took about three seconds to recognize a spectator's face. Foreign spectators accounted for 57% more of attendance in the first half of this year than in the same period last year, after the real-time AI translation service was introduced.
KT is also running an AI cheer-sign service that automatically generates picket designs when fans enter a player's name or a cheer slogan, along with an AI-based fan cam event that recognizes spectators' cheering motions in real time, applies visual effects and displays the results on the stadium scoreboard. "The aim is to weave AI naturally into the experience of watching sports so customers can feel its convenience and value in daily life," a KT official said. "We also plan to use the AI stadium as a testing ground for operating and refining KT's AI services."
