There are multiple screenreaders but their voices simply suck. KDEs espeak has way worse voices than Android eSpeak for some reason.
There is Thorsten Voice, a grest project that sounds really nice.
Not sure if he has a espeak dataset too.
Do you know any others?
Its essential for blind people, I dont think any blind person uses Linux if they have to hear these robot voices every day.
In addition to the very insightful reply by Ferk: Sadly most TTS development seems to be happening as online service these days. Google Neural TTS and Microsoft Azure TTS sound really great but require an online connection, an account, and possibly even paying (there’s a threshold until it’s free, then it costs almost nothing but almost nothing isn’t free).
Btw, I don’t know about the blind people you know but the ones I know use so insanle fast TTS output, the “sounds nice” aspect isn’t really there in the first place. At least not to me.
The development of Piper is being driven by the Home Assistant Project. That probably makes it one of the larger OSS TTS projects. Hope may not be lost yet ;)
And then we’ll live in a TikTok TTS hellscape. 🤣
https://weilbyte.github.io/tiktok-tts/
https://github.com/Weilbyte/tiktok-tts
Okay that is really interesting, so a TTS engine should be optimized to run very fast.