I looked into this a while ago when I was thinking of DMing a TTRPG during the pandemic lockdowns thinking I might be able to use the tech to make having to pla

I looked into this a while ago when I was thinking of DMing a TTRPG during the pandemic lockdowns thinking I might be able to use the tech to make having to play the game online less of a negative and more of a fun different experience… and I was extremely disappointed by the majority of them and just generally disappointed by all of the ones I tried. They all had massive shortcomings of one kind or another, and even the most advanced ones where I would have to pre-record audio and upload that to their online charge by the minute of processed audio… they had a noticeable, irritating dullness, like it was trying to remove expressiveness in order to better conform to to their target waveforms and honestly… it sounded less alive than if I just used a text to speech engine with a female voice like the one that powers Siri. I might be a little biased since I have used a lot of text to speech tools over the years (I routinely listen to hours of TTS generated audio per week to read technical books and research papers that aren’t in audiobook format) and consequently developed a bit of an “ear” for all the ways various TTS engines sound robotic, mangle pronunciation, and generally fail to read how a human would. I’d be very curious which tool or service you used that sounded “freakily realistic”, care to share? I’ve been looking for a good one to test out if running the TTS audio through it sounds any more or less robotic, since their robotic prosody gets deeply tiring with particular kinds of text after a while.