For the "doesn’t sound like a stuttering robot + stays off any lists” problem, local/on-device is the way to go: e.g. tools built around Kokoro (the small open neural model) are currently the sweet spot: natural enough for actual books, runs entirely in the browser or on your machine with no uploads, and you can export the audio if you want. A few browser extensions do exactly this offline after a one-time model download. I use Calibre and it just added proper Kokoro support for its read aloud feature, which is nice if you’re already managing your ebooks there.
I also made one myself for personal use: outside of the Monero-related side of things I mostly live in "I make my own stuff on demand as I like them" mode :) Cloned a voice I wanted, it reads my articles now, and I made sure it doesn’t track me either :)) If you have access/subscription to a decent model you can literally have almost anything on demand (I do that all the time when it's not related to the darker/Monero side of my life :)
And yeah, public domain is the best. IP is the worst. Knowledge should be free!
For the "doesn’t sound like a stuttering robot + stays off any lists” problem, local/on-device is the way to go: e.g. tools built around Kokoro (the small open neural model) are currently the sweet spot: natural enough for actual books, runs entirely in the browser or on your machine with no uploads, and you can export the audio if you want. A few browser extensions do exactly this offline after a one-time model download.
I use Calibre and it just added proper Kokoro support for its read aloud feature, which is nice if you’re already managing your ebooks there.
I also made one myself for personal use: outside of the Monero-related side of things I mostly live in "I make my own stuff on demand as I like them" mode :) Cloned a voice I wanted, it reads my articles now, and I made sure it doesn’t track me either :)) If you have access/subscription to a decent model you can literally have almost anything on demand (I do that all the time when it's not related to the darker/Monero side of my life :)
And yeah, public domain is the best. IP is the worst.
Knowledge should be free!
https://stasher.news/uploads/750