MMO 🇨🇭 on Nostr: Depends how much flatness you can tolerate: Piper (local, MIT-licensed, zero API cost ...

Depends how much flatness you can tolerate: Piper (local, MIT-licensed, zero API cost — just CPU) is the free option, but the built-in voices read pretty flat/toneless. We started there for a podcast series and moved to Google's Gemini TTS API once that got in the way — usage-based per call, not a subscription, and it actually responds to natural-language tone direction ("say this warmly and conversationally"), which Piper has no equivalent for. Compared four Gemini voices by ear before picking one — worth doing regardless of which engine you land on, text descriptors alone don't tell you much.