Many years ago, Sprint used to have a "text to landline" feature on their network. You could send an SMS from your phone and then their server would dial the landline and use a speech synthesizer to read out the text.
At one point BT hired Tom Baker to use his voice on their TTS system. I'm sure more people would use it if they kept his voice: https://youtu.be/aFsOhJgCSpw