For STT whisper is really amazing. But I miss a good TTS. And I don't mind throwing GPU power at it. But anyway. this isn't it either, this sounds worse than kokoro.
This isn't for you, then. You should evaluate quality here based on the fact you don't need a GPU.
Back in the pre-Tacotron2 days, I was running slim TTS and vocoder models like GlowTTS and MelGAN on Digital Ocean droplets. No GPU to speak of. It cost next to nothing to run.
Since then, the trend has been to scale up. We need more models to scale down.
In the future we'll see small models living on-device. Embedded within toys and tools that don't need or want a network connection. Deployed with Raspberry Pi.
Edge AI will be huge for robotics, toys and consumer products, and gaming (ie. world models).
I know but it was more of a general comment. A really good TTS just isn't around yes in the OSS sphere. I looked at some of the other suggestions here but they have too many quirks. Dia sounds great but messages must have certain lengths etc and it picks a random voice every time. I'd love to have something self hosted that's as good as openai.
But it might be worth setting it up and seeing if it improves over time.