I went through the answers (thank you) and the one I had most success with was tortoise-tts [2], which was seriously impressive, but tediously slow due to leveraging both an autoregressive decoder and a diffusion decoder afaik.
Given the ever increasing rate of change in the space of generative AI, I feel it's worth re-asking the question: what (ideally open source, but it's not necessarily a deal breaker) TTS tools are you having the most success with?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34211457 [2] https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts