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?
Its underdeveloped because it isn’t flashy, though quite necessary. Accessibility is one thing that often is neglected (from large support) in general, OSS or otherwise.
Piper tts has quality models. Here are 2 references using it with speech-dispatcher:
Hacked together: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/discussions/328
Ready-made: https://github.com/Elleo/pied