My interest in TTS is around "indie" game creation, animation and "radio plays".
A couple of years ago I started development of a tool to help with the generation of game audio such as NPC dialogue, "barks" or narration for those without access to/budget for human voice actors: https://rancidbacon.itch.io/dialogue-tool-for-larynx-text-to...
One thing I found interesting is that writing a small "scene" and then hearing dialogue being spoken by a variety of voices often prompted the writing of further lines of dialogue in response to perceived emotion contained in voices in the generated output. Plus it was just fun. :)
The version of the tool on that page is based on Larynx TTS which has continued development more recently as Piper TTS: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
A couple of years ago I started development of a tool to help with the generation of game audio such as NPC dialogue, "barks" or narration for those without access to/budget for human voice actors: https://rancidbacon.itch.io/dialogue-tool-for-larynx-text-to...
One thing I found interesting is that writing a small "scene" and then hearing dialogue being spoken by a variety of voices often prompted the writing of further lines of dialogue in response to perceived emotion contained in voices in the generated output. Plus it was just fun. :)
The version of the tool on that page is based on Larynx TTS which has continued development more recently as Piper TTS: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
I'm yet to publish my port which uses Piper TTS though: https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/larynx-dialogue/-/tree/featur...
Though I did upload some sample output (including some "radio announcer" samples in response to a HN comment :) ): https://rancidbacon.gitlab.io/piper-tts-demos/
Obviously there's variations in voice quality, and ability to control expression is currently limited but beats hearing my own voice. :D