There are legitimate uses of this tech, such as preserving voices of people losing them such as Stephen Hawking, or making it better for blind/low vision people to follow text and interact with devices. For that latter case having a more natural voice that is also accurate is a good thing.
I use TTS to listen to articles and stories that don't have access to an audiobook narrator. I've used some of the voices based on MBROLA tech, but those can grate after a while.
The more recent voice models are a lot higher quality and emotive (without the jarring pitch transitions of things like Cepstral) so are better to listen to. However, the recent models can clip/skip text, have prolonged silence, have long/warped/garbled words, etc. that make them harder to use longer term.
I use TTS to listen to articles and stories that don't have access to an audiobook narrator. I've used some of the voices based on MBROLA tech, but those can grate after a while.
The more recent voice models are a lot higher quality and emotive (without the jarring pitch transitions of things like Cepstral) so are better to listen to. However, the recent models can clip/skip text, have prolonged silence, have long/warped/garbled words, etc. that make them harder to use longer term.