this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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Yeah, in my opinion this sounds worse than DECtalk from all the way back in 1983 (for instance, Perfect Paul). Or MacinTalk (see its usage in Whatever Happened to Robot Jones, particularly the original version).
The newer stuff often tries to sound less robotic but then if it doesn't have the complexity to sound realistic it just sounds worse, harder to understand and yet also sounding uglier... warbly.
Depends what you mean by newer stuff. OpenAI is pretty good in terms of tts
I meant newer than the context I stated (1983). And also ground floor stuff that doesn't need internet (after install) and doesn't need a purchase/sign-up. Available by default or not too obscure to get decent voices.
There might be some half-decent voices somewhere, but it really just doesn't seem like it's night-and-day for the ground floor stuff from what I've seen. Maybe some vocaloid stuff but even that seems like a chore to do the phonemes manually to get expected pronunciation.
Why are these voices a feature of the browser instead of the OS?
They are! OP made an error in their post.