piper
Indeed piper performs very well. Thank you for the input, I will most certainly consider adding the option to select tts engine in the near future, piper sounds totally worth it.
speech-dispatcher
If you are referring to locally generated speech synthesis, the respecting outcome as far as I am concerned generally sounds generally poorer, and is more difficult to manage. However you can check out the original project https://gitlab.com/christosangel/sapo, where the audio files are generated locally.
Do you mean an option to choose between various tts methods?
And, as far as
send-your-text-to-Microsoft bit
goes, well, if MS wants a copy of Brothers Karamazov, they can save themselves the trouble and get it here , it is free https://www.gutenberg.org/
I totally undersand what you are saying. Initially, the original project used local text-to-speech, but was less than perfect, slower and cpu-costly.
You can check it out here https://gitlab.com/christosangel/sapo
Once a FOSS solution gets better and more usable, swapping the tts conversion is not a great deal.
A cron job would not be a bad idea.