Interesting; I was thinking about creating something like that a few years ago - since I love listening to information a lot while doing some chores/walking - but back then, all available text-to-speech converters were unbearably robotic.

How much time does it take to convert a book/doc into audio using your approach? Also, as I understood it all runs locally, so you don't need to pay for any API access/usage?

With Chatterbox this finally feels almost possible. I find that I am sensitive to pacing issues which it often has. Kokoro was just alright. I'm using a tool I hacked together that runs Minimax Speech-02-HD which is still a whole other level, IMO, but not that cheap. Inworld-TTS-1-max is cheaper - I'm trialing it these days. async.ai seems promising too.

Thanks for the tool! I'm also quite interested in this space.