This “voicebot.ai” article is fascinating. It talks about a new synthetic voice called ‘Cerence Reader’ that is based on neural text-to-speech (TTS) and designed to read news to commuters.

This synthetic voice is unlike others – it has pausing, breathing and inflection – so it seem more humanlike than other synthetically generated voices.The article notes a preference for human voices becomes more intense when the passages of content are longer. So this could be a big development as noted in the article with this thought: “Having a synthetic speech option that sounds more humanlike opens up audio access to far more content than is available today and it can be available in real-time.”