Words like read (present vs. past tense) or Nice (the adjective vs. the French city) can be pronounced in two different ways. Same with an address / to address, a present / to present etc.

Determining which way to use is impossible without understanding the text. You can get pretty far by using some simple heuristics. For example, when the word read is preceded by "have", you almost always want to use the past tense pronunciation, but if it's preceded by "to", you want the present tense. At some point, though, you will hit the "time flies like an arrow" vs. "fruit flies like a banana" problem, and simple sentence analysis will not be enough.

Another issue with English is that it likes to mash words together, and most pronunciation rules are not ready for that. While "Black Lives Matter" might be easy to pronounce, #blacklivesmatter is not. Getting this wrong sometimes leads to hilarious results[1].

I'm blind and I use a speech synthesizer daily, so I'm familiar with most of these issues. I haven't found a single piece of software that actually solved them well. This is still much better than languages like Hebrew, though, as they require you to manually insert vowels in the appropriate places, a task modern computers are not ready for.

[1] https://www.boredpanda.com/worst-domain-names/?utm_source=go...