Piss-broke nursing student, here.
The amount of reading I'm having to crank through on a weekly basis is pretty insane - I've been leaning heavily on text-to-speech software to knock the chapters out as fast as possible.
The best I've found so far - which isn't FOSS - is https://speechify.com/text-to-speech-online/ ...enough of it's free and accessible to get the job done, but it's got some pretty instrusive "buy me!" features built in, like if I'm listening to a large document and hit the pause button, I'm basically screwed because when I click play I get a prompt for "To continue listening, sign up for premium!"
Hoping to find better options if there are any, especially for ones that offer decent voice options. Some of them are impressively near-human sounding, while others sound like Microsoft Sam from like 1998; the quality and variety of voices make a big difference in retention for me (replaying a lecture with different voices is proving to be a pretty effective study habit).
More focused on the 'free' part vs the open source bit, but the latter would ofc be a good perk.
Know of any good options?
Thank you!!
Is running your own one an option?
https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS