Yes, things have changed a lot! I still don’t think it’s good enough for pronunciation purposes, but it works quite well for even on word level nowadays. I wrote an article about audio flashcards in Anki that rely on TTS recently, but that’s all I’ve done. I should probably write something about TTS in general, perhaps a more in-depth investigation of what’s available and how good it is for learners.

I would agree when it comes to full sentences, but I’ve found it’s perfectly good enough for individual words (such as for an Anki deck)

Oh course the situation has also improved a lot since you posted that comment as well.

I would be careful with TTS for learning purposes unless your Chinese is already very good. No TTS service I know of generate good enough spoken Chinese to be used in an educational setting. Good enough for understanding what they say? Yes. Good enough that you want to hear a lot of it before your pronunciation is near-native? No.

Eve, do you have Windows 10? I ask because the TTS voices for Chinese are very good, You’ll have to install the free Chinese Language Pack and then select the voice in Settings. If you need any help, just ask.

“Cartoon Romance of the 3 Kingdoms Chinese history”.
Didn’t have time to start watching it, but it looks quite good.

Olle, you mention “Audacity” and other programs, does anybody know a good and free Text-To-Speech program with Chinese voices? What I’m looking for is a TTS program that has decent Chinese voices and that will let me record the audio as an MP3… I found a few, but either they weren’t available for free, or the voices were just awful (metallic and coming out in bursts), or I could listen but not keep the file for later usage.

Many thanks! And congrats again, Olle, for the fantastic job 😉

My bad, I didn’t realize that the second link had subtitles…