I did a bunch of work with TTS about 15 years ago for a project and had landed on Festival and the Nitech voices as the best free option at that time. It's inte

I did a bunch of work with TTS about 15 years ago for a project and had landed on Festival and the Nitech voices as the best free option at that time. It's interesting that this seems to still be the best free non-cloud option available. What a lot of people don't realize is that Festival is intended for creating new TTS voices based on your own voice. The fact that it generates TTS is an artifact of it's main function. I've never messed with that functionality myself but I always wonder if someone could train a synthetic voice to sound better with a larger sample set. The Nitech voices are definitely better so it's certainly possible to encourage Festival do a better job.