[magicalhippo]

I saw that the piper-phonemize project linked to espeak-ng, and so I tried to pass the Piper sample text through espeak-ng and the way it phonemicized the text had the same rhythm issues that I noted in the TTS sample. Ie it put the stresses in the same wrong places in certain words and such.

This was also reflected in the voice output of espeak-ng, even though it's overall quality was vastly subpar compared to Piper TTS (as expected).

So it seems that improving this aspect might be one way to get better performance out of Piper for my language. Not sure how easy that'll be tho...