like even when theyre trying to sound excited or friendly its still so obviously not real?? i get why its useful for accessibility and stuff but i miss the era of quirky text-to-speech tools with weird robot voices that sounded like they belonged in an old arcade game remember stephen hawkings speech synthesizer?? honestly it was so distinct and almost... endearing in its roboticness. now its all about sounding 'human' but it just ends up feeling uncanny valley. also tangent but did you know some astronomers think there might be 'voices' in space if we could pick up electromagnetic waves as sound? like pulsars kind of chirp in a super rhythmic way and there was this one project where they turned cosmic ray data into music (not great music tbh but still cool). it feels way more alive than most ai voices lol. anyway im probably overthinking this but sometimes i wish tech leaned into being obviously machine-y instead of faking humanity so hard. whats the point of having ai if it doesnt sound at least a little bit like it could narrate a retro sci-fi trailer??