Really interesting article. I'm particularly passionate about this subject, I've been fascinated with TTS for a number of years. I've trained many voices, both for Piper and some of the newer LLM based systems, and while I can't speak to the speed issue, training data is extremely important.

What you feed into these models has a big impact on the voice's performance overall. If you give it stuff scrape from the web, random audiobooks that weren't optimized for TTS, things like that, you're not going to get good results for the type of work screen reader users do every day. This applies to all of these systems, not even just neural networks. The latency / responsiveness issue is something we'll have to solve at some point, because I don't think using TTS systems last updated in 2003 is going to work out in the longterm, as much as I love Eloquence.

In my ideal world, we would have either a machine learning based or formant system that is easy to train / maintain. Big companies have lost interest in on device TTS, not even just for screen reader users. Many of the solutions being put out now are cloud based, and while developers are still creating on device models, as said in the article, they're not optimized for our needs and may never be. I think we have to take matters into our own hands and figure this out, but I believe with enough people we can make it happen.

isn't it possible to "pregenerate" the speech with all the necessary IDs so that you can navigate and interrupt at will?
Just as one generates SSML from rich text (including maths formulas) before generating speech.

It would even be better to catch intonations, breaths and others, unchanged instead of letting the TTS generating a "pleasant full phrase" (a wrong expectation).

I find your post intriguingly close to the emerging reaction against the Ai-generated #mundaneslop .

I used /e/OS before but don't currently, but here are my experiences, hope this helps:

1. Google Pay/Google Wallet is a lost cause, accept having to bring your bank card when leaving the house.
2. Anything you can find in IzzyOnDroid or F-Droid will work fine. I strongly recommend installing an F-Droid client: izzyondroid.org/quickstart/, you can already get used to some apps :)
3. Most apps will work fine but not all. Try Sapio and Plexus to see compat info. Mostly banking apps are a pain.

Get Started - IzzyOnDroid

Quick steps to get started with IzzyOnDroid on your Android device

^{izzyondroid.org}

I think you do need to go in with a mindset and willingness to compromise sometimes. If you go in with the idea of "I can run anything I randomly download from Google Play" you will be disappointed. But if your general way of using your phone is "as little apps as possible" it may be fairly pain-free, especially if you prioritize apps from IzzyOnDroid and F-Droid.

May be worth making a list of apps you really aren't willing to lose and ask other /e/OS users specifically about those apps.