It's still obviously synthesized but it may be good enough for many applications. Alternatively, voice actors are generally pretty cheap and they're usually no

It's still obviously synthesized but it may be good enough for many applications. Alternatively, voice actors are generally pretty cheap and they're usually not the limiting factor of much at all, though it does depend. The cost of no-name actors is almost an insignificant part of production cost. As someone note above - things like the voice enabled stop announcements for bus/rail/subway stops etc. - this would be ideal.