Most of us just need a machine to have the ability to speak to us in a way that sounds halfway human, but not as horrible as old open source TTS systems.
My current go to is Piper TTS: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
It's MIT-licensed, supports ~30 languages and multiple voices[0]/quality/licenses.
Voice output samples: https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/
Discovered just now that recently there's also been some efforts to train Public Domain/CC-BY licensed voices specifically for Piper TTS too: https://brycebeattie.com/files/tts/
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[0] e.g. One of the English voice sets has ~900 voices(!).
however if i am going to listen to 3 hours of audiobook, i would still pay for a better TTS versus Piper. (now i buy a lot of audiobooks read by voice actors but not every book i want to audio-read has a market to support a voice actor being paid to read it)
however Piper is definitely going in the correct direction though, huge progress.