Sherpa looks like a nice all-in-one solution. I'm just not sure if Kaldi still is the latest and greatest when it comes to high quality TTS.

I've tried Kokoro, Orpheus, Chatterbox and those sound very nice, but it's just the TTS. And then a few ones I haven't tried are fish and OuteTTS. And then there is Kaldi and xTTSv2.

There are some projects building upon TTS to create similar things, though I've mainly looked into the dialogue and podcast creation:

• Dia (does dialogue, works for English and can do a few rudimentary things like laugh and chuckle)
• Mozilla's Document-to-Podcast
• Chatterbox-Audio is someone trying to do audiobooks with Chatterbox, though I'm not sure about the quality and progress of the attempt
• And a few abandoned attempts like Podcastify, Podcast-LLM from when Google introduced NotebookLM and people tried to recreate that. But I don't think it's very helpful if you want a tool that actually works.

I ended up writing a Python script myself to split up the text into paragraphs, feed it to Kokoro/Orpheus and then stitch back together the generated audio into a dialogue. I didn't find anything that did the exact thing I wanted to do. And Dia gave me a particularly bad time because the talking speed was all over the place and the voices weren't very consistent.

Is your goal to create things that can be published or used in a project, or to create audiobooks for yourself to listen to?

For voiceovers for text, I use Kokoro Fast API, which has a web frontend. The frontend is only compatible with Chromium browsers on desktop or Android, which sucks as my daily driver is Firefox and an iPhone (there are workarounds in the thread) but it supports voice mixing, speed changes, etc.. It also has an issue where it keeps the models (about 3GB) in memory; I keep the CPU version loaded normally and swap to the GPU version if I need it to be faster. If you want something similar for Bark, check out Bark-GUI.

I’ve also dabbled a bit in some TTS features that have Comfy nodes, though at this point mostly just in terms of getting them set up. For my purposes thus far Kokoro has been fine (and I prefer the FastAPI project over the Comfy nodes for most of my uses), but I’ve found nodes for Kokoro, Dia, F5 TTS, Orpheus, and Zonos.

Autiobooks and audiblez both look promising. A few weeks ago, I used the Kokoro FastAPI web frontend to create an audiobook for an ebook I worked on that used entirely self-hosted AI generation for the outlining and prose. Audiblez, which I found about like two days after that, looks like it would have simplified that process substantially. Still, I’d personally like something more like an audiobook studio, where I can more easily swap voices back and forth, add emotions, play with speed on a more granular level, etc.. I’m thinking about building something that contains that at some point myself, but it’ll be a minute - hopefully someone else will beat me there.

I posted a comment here a few weeks back on a similar topic. I’ve since used OpenReader-WebUI and like it, though that’s not for producing audiobooks, but for a read-along experience. Reproducing the comment below in case it’s helpful for you:

If you want to generate audiobooks using your own / a hosted TTS server, check out one of these options:

• OpenReader-WebUI - this has built-in read along capability and can be deployed as a PWA that can allow you to download the audiobooks to your phone so you can use them offline
• p0n1/epub to audiobook
• ebook2audiobook If you don’t have a decent GPU, Kokoro is a great option as it’s fast enough to run on CPU and still sounds very good. If you’re going to use Kokoro, Audiblez (posted by another commenter) looks like it makes that more of an all-in-one option. If you want something that you can use without an upfront building of the audiobook, of the above options, only OpenReader-WebUI supports that. RealtimeTTS is a library that handles that, but I don’t know if there are already any apps out there that integrate it. If you have the audiobook generation handled and just want to be able to follow along with text / switch between text and audio, check out https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.io/storyteller/

I once got kobold.CPP working with their collection of TTS model+ wav tokenizer system. Here's the wiki page on it.

It may not be as natural as a commercial voice model but may be enough to wet your appetite in the event that other solutions feel overwhelmingly complicated