I am not. The use cases like interactive assistants for the blind will generate very little commercial activity compared to the uses (and abuses) for entertainment and marketing purposes. A good example of this from the real world is the absence of cheap/open ASL interpretation for deaf people.

Ever notice big huge font on the phone of older people? So big that a screen may only contain a few lines of text. Or that people has to pull out their reading glasses every time they check their phone? Text to speech is a godsend in that case. Enormous benefits to an increasingly older population.

'helping blind people' was literally the first use case I mentioned. Maybe you should have read the comment before reacting to it.

Huh? How big is the blind group compared to the older population?

You are saying it’s not economical to use tech to speech to support blind people. I’m saying the benefits are huge for older population. It isn’t just for fraudsters or spammers as you claim.

No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying the resources invested in helping people will be dwarfed by those invested in crap designed to exploit them economically or criminally.

Set asides the fact that you have absolutely no proof of that claim, the criminal world is tiny compared to the people who benefit from TTS (God forbid if that isn’t the case). Encryption, as an example, is hugely beneficial to the regular people despite being used or exploited extensively in the shady and questionable activities.

Completely different technology. Encryption doesn't directly replace human labor. And nobody is complaining about the existence of TTS per se, but rather pointing out that lots of resources are being poured into replacing human expressive performance skills with machinery. There's a strike on in Hollywood right now because studio owners want to strongarm performers into contractual arrangements that give away resynthesis rights of their appearance and performance in perpetuity.

None of the objections voiced to my original comment have even attempted to engage with this economic industrial reality.

Imagine having an app on your phone that turns any ebook into an audiobook.

Imagine replacing crappy phone menus with polite virtual assistants that actually understand what you're saying.

Imagine an AI language tutor that speaks every language in the world fluently. Or a universal speech-to-speech translator.

And that's just off the top of my head. Clever people will come up with a lot more uses, I'm sure.