[krackers]

Google products to me are the definition of mediocrity. They're "designed by committee" and play it safe, they're probably "good enough" for most people, but they're certainly not the best in class. As you noted Google Translate pales in comparison to DeepL, Google's TTS are worse than similar offerings from Amazon/AWS, let alone more niche focused products like Voicepeak, and you know that they're phoning it in for search given that there's a startup (Kagi) whose sole value proposiion is to use Google's own API then rerank results to achieve much better results.