If anyone is wondering about audiobooks, English books tend to range from 100k to 500k characters, so $1.6-$8 to do it via Google Cloud TtS. Presumably the emotion won't be there like a (much more expensive) human narrator, but naturally, they're working on the emotion/inflection bit too: https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/expressive-speech-synthesis-with.html Something something sentiment-analysis+prosody-embedding+WaveNet... More on reddit.com

I've been using "Read Aloud: A Text-to-Speech Voice Reader." It's a bit robotic, but you can play with the pitch, speed, and volume to get it bearable. More on reddit.com

It is used when the phone speaks to you. It is especially important as an accessibility feature for sight impairment, but it often used for features that many typical users use. This can be for things like reading messages on your screen out loud or for when Google assistant or Google Maps navigation speaks to you. You can configure the language, accent, speed, etc. If you never want your phone to speak to you, I suppose it isn't necessary, but it might not be easy to remove without root. There are also third party text to speech engines that can be used to replace it, though I find Google's tends to be the most realistic (least robotic sounding). More on reddit.com

Mycroft has a good run down of options. https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/using-mycroft-ai/customizations/stt-engine More on reddit.com