I saw that the piper-phonemize project linked to espeak-ng, and so I tried to pass the Piper sample text through espeak-ng and the way it phonemicized the text had the same rhythm issues that I noted in the TTS sample. Ie it put the stresses in the same wrong places in certain words and such.
This was also reflected in the voice output of espeak-ng, even though it's overall quality was vastly subpar compared to Piper TTS (as expected).
So it seems that improving this aspect might be one way to get better performance out of Piper for my language. Not sure how easy that'll be tho...
I’m sure it’s possible to train new voices.
The English voices are hit or miss, but some voices have up to 900 speakers so it should be able to find a nice voice in the hay stack.
The thing I like about piper is it is so fast. I set it up to stream the output to VLC and it starts speaking in less than a second even on my laptop.
I wish it could have eleven labs quality but right now the speed is the most important factor for what I’m doing with it.