I’ve found a website NaturalReaders dot com that allows you to convert text to AI speech quickly and freely. The “free” narrators are quite good and definitely better than the computer TTS that Linq uses.
If you want to download the MP3 or use “better” narrators, then you’ll need to pay.
There’s a workaround however: by using Audacity, as the audio is playing, you can record it to the program and then export it to an MP3.
FYI: You can use a 1 million-character(about 20h)-per-month amount of TTS on Google Cloud for free.
Also, with the TTS playground in my add-on, you can easily generate and download the audio file using that API.
Sound quality of the google cloud TTS API
You mention add-on…is it a browser extension? I can’t find anything called “TTS playground” in the chrome extensions for example, but maybe it’s named something else?
@Mycroft, I’ve been using Natural Readers for a few months now and quite like it so far. I do pay for the tier that allows the downloading and saving…I think you can some fancier voices too, if I remember. Also nice are the community uploaded voices. They sound very natural, although one caveat to that is that every so often, there may be a particular sound in the language that isn’t accurate. I’m guessing it occurs if that sound is never produced in the recording that one probably must upload to add the community voice (I’m not sure how this works exactly since I haven’t done it myself). I’ve not had that issue with any of the voices Natural Readers has created though.
This is the add-on: LingQ Extension (Custom Layouts, GPT, AI-TTS, Lesson Audio Generation, etc.) - #154 by vet8t6z79pc4
i uploaded an ebook there and it worked really well, the audio synced word for word perfectly. Here in lingQ i dread doing my own imported lesson due to bad syncing. Some books i just give up halfway because i was spending more time adjusting tweaking timestamp. it was beautiful seeing the syncing in NaturalReader.
UPDATE: The free version only allows 5min per day. 
If you reached the monthly limit, you can generate 20 hours of the lesson audio for free with the google cloud TTS API! Its quality is better than LingQ’s ones.
Yes, $10 per month for the TTS utility is a bit high for private use, I think.
My add-on is free, and each TTS provider doesn’t require a subscription; you pay only for what you use. Google Cloud TTS offers free credits of 1 million characters per month, so you can use it for free.
Yes, you are correct, as to the pricing of the Google Cloud offering. I refer to the NaturalReaders website, which started this discussion.
