Does anyone know who the leader is in affordable speech synthesis for hobby projects ?
Atm I am using Amazon Polly but am unsure if another offering is far superior. eleven labs is not affordable for my slightly serious level of job ting but aws and google seem well priced. Any other suggestions for a product I can try out?
Take a look at Piper. It's the tts solution used by the open source home automation project HomeAssistant. Produces decent quality speech in a couple seconds on raspberry pi class hardware.
I think this is the link. Not 100% sure though, is this correct?