Ask HN: Why are there so few American TTS accents?
Google Cloud, AWS, IBM all seem to offer a generic American English accent but with different voices. Given the huge variety of regional and ethnic accents/dialect in the US, why aren't there more options?
Looking for both technical and business insights.
- If you do some, there will be nagging requests to do all of them, however minor they would be
- Accents are not a clear-cut thing, hence customers would argue that "this is not how we pronounce X" based on their variation
- Maybe there's no real need, as most companies in need of a TTS probably operate in the whole country (think telcos and such). People are used to the generic accent since the TV and radio appeared.