so i yes, espeak exists and still sounds terrible even worse than picoTTS (last update 4 yrs ago?). so what else is there? i look at mimic3 and it says they are dead and one should go for piper here: https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3 the link to piper followed I get: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper "This repository was archived by the owner on Oct 6, 2025. It is now read-only. "
ok, so coqui? https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS no update in over 12 months…how bad can it be? https://coqui.ai/ …great it is a page for gambling now.
so, what are you using? gTTS is not offline.
Faster Whisper could be a option, there is various GUI options available as well.
https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper
And if you are looking for something that you can “just install”, I recommend balabolka. The voices are natural and you can use some of the windows built in voices to make it more natural.
https://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm
Make Azure natural TTS voices accessible to any SAPI 5-compatible application.
https://github.com/gexgd0419/NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter