so i yes, espeak exists and still sounds terrible even worse than picoTTS (last update 4 yrs ago?). so what else is there? i look at mimic3 and it says they are dead and one should go for piper here: https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3 the link to piper followed I get: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper "This repository was archived by the owner on Oct 6, 2025. It is now read-only. "

ok, so coqui? https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS no update in over 12 months…how bad can it be? https://coqui.ai/ …great it is a page for gambling now.

so, what are you using? gTTS is not offline.

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    1 day ago

    Tbh I generally prefer that robot voices actually sound like robots. I don’t want human sounding TTS since I don’t like anthropomorphized machines. So I’d stay with something low tech.

    • Buckshot@programming.devEnglish
      3·
      12 hours ago

      100%. It irks when software has messages in the first person. The human-like TTS are very uncanny valley to me.

      I needed voice over for a video recently and everyone is telling me to use AI, I tried dozens and they’ll all just off. Ended up getting a friend to record it. I don’t have a decent mic so my own recording sounded bad.

      • Teppichbrand@feddit.orgEnglish
        3·
        11 hours ago

        I went back from SherpaTTS to eSpeak because I liked the robot woman better. She’s easy to understand, takes up 5 mb on my phone and it’s a fun conversation starter.