You do need to know about a person to understand why he did a project that he did. What were his motivations and goals? That is the point here which can be inferred from his bio/talks.
His goals need not be what you want them to be; his project; his rules.
Nobody is claiming this is something earth-shattering; just that it is an interesting project on a difficult subject matter. The author has linked to the paper for the project on the site itself which you can read for your edification.
From the introduction;
Classical Sanskrit recitation, parāyaṇa, is a chanted rather than a read register. A faithful synthesizer must hold long vowels, sustain a terminal visarga, articulate retroflex and aspirated consonants, render dense consonant conjuncts cleanly, and respect the metrical structure of the verse.
None of these is well served by general-purpose text-to-speech, and there is essentially no chant-domain training data available off the shelf. The problem is therefore doubly hard: it is low-resource, and the target prosody is a specialized melodic contour rather than ordinary read speech.
This report describes a system, Vāgdhenu, that solves the practical version of this problem well enough to ship two large deployments, and it documents the design decisions, the dead ends, and the one negative result that turned out to be the most useful finding. We do not claim a new
model. We claim an honest account of what it takes to build a faithful Sanskrit chant pipeline on top of current open backbones, what works, and what is architecturally out of reach.
Our framing is that of an experience report. The evidence we offer is the comparative lineage
across architecture families, a reproducible production system, two shipped artifacts at real scale,
and a public release of code, weights, data, and a live demonstration. Formal listening studies are
limited to expert evaluation, which we state plainly and treat as a limitation rather than a result.
As a practical example; if you have ever heard even the common Gayathri Mantra being chanted by a Tamil Thanjavur Brahmin priest vs. a UP Allahabad Brahmin priest you would know the wide difference in utterances. Having something like this gives you a reference (albeit with a South Indian Kannada bent) to compare against.