[asaddhamani]

Piper seems roughly equivalent to old-school TTS outputs that sound flat, jumpy with the concatenative approach. Listen to this first example I tried:

https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/samples/en/en_GB/ala...

Of all the TTS APIs I have tried, I like OpenAI voices the best. Haven't considered things like elevenlabs because I find them ridiculously expensive.

I love voice to voice interfaces, but only when they sound natural to my ears, and the current pricing for good ones is prohibitive for a huge number of use cases.

[em-bee]

well, i was comparing it to the free tools available a few years ago, and against that, this example is a markable improvement. it's the first that i could actually bear to listen to over a longer period of time. i expect just another few years and this will actually be good.