I wanted to make a human-like reading feature for our language-learning software. Training a model isn't too hard using something like https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS.

The weak link was the available free/open datasets. You needed a single speaker with a pleasant voice, 20hrs+ material from varied sources, recorded in a good recording enviroment with a good mic etc. For English, the go-to was LJSpeech, which doesn't fulfill all these requirements. I say 'was', as I haven't followed developments recently.

Last year we decided to make our own dataset with a Irish woman, Jenny. She has a soft Irish lilt.

Never got around around to training the model, but I will upload the raw audio and prompts here in a few hours (need to pay my internet bill in town..):

https://github.com/dioco-group/jenny-tts-dataset/blob/main/R...