I'm setting up a laptop with Mint (Cinnamon) for a person who needs text-to-speech software. It seems like most of the nice-sounding ones are proprietary. Any recommendations for FOSS alternatives? And any ideas why this is an underdeveloped area for open source?
TTS with coqui xTTS is fun to run with a known voice (10sec wav file is enought). It requires some resources but far less than STT like faster-whisper.
I think the main issue is not running them but integrate them with the OS/softwares.