For local TTS for a podcast I'd try the quantized .gguf versions of Microsoft VibeVoice large in comfyui to clone my voice from a ~30 second speech sample the apply it to marked-up text of the desired podcast. But it'd be nowhere near real time and require dedicating a $300 GPU to it. And the quantized version often goes off the rails and loses consistency in voice tone or accent. So just one run often isn't enough and I you have to piece the good parts of many separate runs together. It's not set it and forget it.

I do a lot of desktop screen-reader and pdf/doc/epub/etc text to speech every single day. It's been 20 years and I still use Festival 1.96 TTS with voice_nitech_us_slt_arctic_hts voice because it's so computational cheap and just slightly a step about normal festival/espeak/mbrolla/etc type TTS quality to be clear and tolerable. In terms of this local "do screenreader stuff really fast" use case I've tried modern TTS like vibevoice, kokoro tts, sherpa-onx, piper tts, orpheus tts, etc. And they all have consistency issues, many are way too slow even with a $300 GPU dedicated to them, and most output weird garble noises at unpredictable times along with the good output.