But I wish there were an offline, on-device, multilingual text-to-speech solution with good voices for a standard PC — one that doesn't require a GPU, tons of RAM, or max out the CPU.
In my research, I didn't find anything that fits the bill. People often mention Tortoise TTS, but I think it garbles words too often. The only plug-in solution for desktop apps I know of is the commercial and rather pricey Acapela SDK.
I hope someone can shrink those new neural network–based models to run efficiently on a typical computer. Ideally, it should run at under 50% CPU load on an average Windows laptop that’s several years old, and start speaking almost immediately (less than 400ms delay).
The same goes for speech-to-text. Whisper.cpp is fine, but last time I looked, it wasn't able to transcribe audio at real-time speed on a standard laptop.
I'd pay for something like this as long as it's less expensive than Acapela.
(My use case is an AAC app.)