I thought everyone (11Labs, open source, OpenAI even) already has human-level TTS models? Is there still an open challenge somewhere (e.g., is there a use case where a better model would make any difference?).
When it comes to naturalness for dialog, OpenAI actually has the best voices I've heard—significantly better than Azure or 11 Labs which are second and third best. But at least the voices they expose through ChatGPT are fairly muted and inexpressive.
It’s getting clearer — in the future, if you didn’t see it happen in real life then it didn’t happen.
I'm convinced that all these AI technologies have legitimate use cases. But it's far too easy to use them to generate endless streams of noise, spam, and mistrust and drown out anything valuable.