Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Whether it's your 10th time playing or your first, the Masters at Augusta National Golf Club is a daunting task for every golfer. It's the only major of the golfing season that's continuously played at the same course, yet golfers sometimes take weeks off between tournaments just to prepare for it. Like any sport, analytics factor into a golfer's preparation, with statisticians used by almost everyone on Tour, helping them track previous rounds on any given course to figure out a game plan each week.

When Apple quietly launched a catalog of A.I.-narrated audiobooks early in January, it was surprising news, and it wasn't. Robot narrators are not new: Alexa provides text-to-speech for Kindle content and Google offers a suite of artificial voices of various genders and accents for those wishing to publish "auto-narrated" audiobooks. The difference is that Apple's four voices--"Madison" and "Jackson" suggested for fiction, "Helena" and "Mitchell" for nonfiction--sound much more natural than the digitally-generated voices available elsewhere, leading to fears that they could replace human narrators altogether. A few of Apple's voices are even noticeably similar to the voices of well-known members of the community of human audiobook narrators. "There's a little tension there," Edoardo Ballerini told me.

But in the future, will humans still be the most popular storytellers or will robots end up dominating the booming industry? Well Apple clearly thinks there's a market for the latter as it has quietly launched a catalogue of books that are narrated by artificial intelligence. This new feature is just the start of what will be a fierce battle with the likes of Amazon and Spotify for an industry that insiders think could be worth more than $35 billion (£29 billion) by 2030. You can find the robot-voiced audiobooks, which use text-to-speech translation, by searching for'AI narration' on Apple's Books app. There are two types of AI voice available to choose from, both of which have an American accent and speak only in English.

When you browse Apple Books for your next audiobook, you might come across a few titles with a note that says they were "Narrated by Apple Books." That's because the tech giant has released a catalogue of titles that make use of its new AI-powered digital narration service. The company said the service uses the advanced speech synthesis technology it developed "to produce high-quality audiobooks from an ebook file." According to The Guardian, Apple approached independent publishers who may be interested in teaming up for the project's launch in recent months. Authors were reportedly told that the company behind the technology would shoulder the costs of turning their books into audiobooks and that they would be earning royalties.

For the first few seconds, the narrator of Kristen Ethridge's new romance audiobook, Shelter from the Storm, sounds like a human being. The voice is light and carefully enunciated, with the slow pacing of any audiobook narrator, as it begins: "There's a storm coming, and her name is Hope." "I know that sounds a little crazy," the breathy voice continues, grinding out the words. "That something so destructive could be labeled with such a peaceful name." It's the aural equivalent of watching the gears of a machine rotate under a surface of what looks like human skin.

I've been talking about AI narration for several years now, but it's just starting to go mainstream and I've been getting emails every day recently asking the same questions, so this is a round-up article with the most important information. For context, I am an audiobook narrator. I absolutely value human narrators, and I have spent tens of thousands of dollars hiring professional narrators for my novels and non-fiction over the last decade. I am also a futurist and I embrace AI tools as part of my creative and business practice. This episode is sponsored by my patrons at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Thank you for enabling me to continue exploring the future of creativity and the author business model. You can find out lots more on how AI can help you create and earn more in my course on The AI-Assisted Author. You can find all my courses here on Teachable. I'd love to know what you think.

Large language models can be used for collaborative storytelling. In this work we report on using GPT-3 \cite{brown2020language} to co-narrate stories. The AI system must track plot progression and character arcs while the human actors perform scenes. This event report details how a novel conversational agent was employed as creative partner with a team of professional improvisers to explore long-form spontaneous story narration in front of a live public audience. We introduced novel constraints on our language model to produce longer narrative text and tested the model in rehearsals with a team of professional improvisers. We then field tested the model with two live performances for public audiences as part of a live theatre festival in Europe. We surveyed audience members after each performance as well as performers to evaluate how well the AI performed in its role as narrator. Audiences and performers responded positively to AI narration and indicated preference for AI narration over AI characters within a scene. Performers also responded positively to AI narration and expressed enthusiasm for the creative and meaningful novel narrative directions introduced to the scenes. Our findings support improvisational theatre as a useful test-bed to explore how different language models can collaborate with humans in a variety of social contexts.