[rob74]

Ok, I get it, state of the art TTS uses AI techniques and so eats processing power, buuuuut seeing that much older efforts which ran on devices like old PCs, the Amiga, the original Macintosh, the Kindle etc. used much less CPU for speech that you could (mostly) understand without problems, it may be worth exploring if it's possible to write a better "dumb" (i.e. non-AI) speech synthesizer?

[ben_w]

Better than the ones those systems already have? I assume they’ve already got some AI, because without AI, “minute” and “minute” get pronounced the same way because there’s no contextual clue to which instance is the unit of time and which is a fancy way of describing something as very small.

[DonHopkins]

I'm still hoping that a human being can tell which of the four possible ways to pronounce the name of the English post-punk band, "The The".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_The

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orIy18qIaCU

[ben_w]

I have a soft spot for the Yorkshire pronunciation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzymb0YJp7E&t=160s