[rnjesus]

the azure neural tts voices in chinese are the best i’ve heard, specifically the “xiaochen” voice. i use it in anki daily to generate sentences for my mandarin decks with an api key/plugin. it’s not something you run locally of course, but they have a decent enough free tier.

i’m hoping a voice as realistic as this becomes a local app soon, but i’ve not found anything that’s nearly as natural sounding yet. (also, honorable mention to chatgpt’s “sky.” she pronounces mandarin with a funnily american accent, but it sounds natural and not as robotic as the open-source alternatives i’ve tried)