Formatting - was Would you be interested in having natural sounding TTS voices by Readspeaker on Linux? demo link included

[Linux for blind general discussion]

I had always assumed early speech synthesizers where obviously
non-human because the technology simply didn't exist to make more
human sounding voices viable...

As for responsiveness, I think there are two different things being
conflated here. It is indeed erroneous to equate TTS with the frontend
tool using it, whether that frontend is a screen reader, a mechanical
voicebox for the mute, or what have you, and yes, the screen reader,
if that's what's using the TTS should be controlling most of what the
TTS is doing, but it's important that the TTS be able to render speech
quickly enough that the screen reader can actually use it.

A TTS that can take an eBook as input and spit out an audiobook
indistinguishable from one recorded by a professional reader in a
sound booth would be great for generating audiobooks even if it took
twice as long to render the audio as to play it back, but it would be
kind of lousy to use with a screen reader if it took 5 seconds to
speak everytime Orca sent it a sentence to speak. I could be wrong,
but I suspect this is the kind of thing whoever originally asked about
responsiveness was talking about.