Can't most people read faster than they can hear? Isn't this why phone menus are so awful? > But there seems to be no good way to output spoken text without do

Can't most people read faster than they can hear? Isn't this why phone menus are so awful? > But there seems to be no good way to output spoken text without doing round-trips to a server and generate the audio there As people have been pointing out, we've had mediocre TTS since the 80s. If it was a real benefit people would be using even the inadequate version.