@matchboxbananasynergy If they have a build that includes espeak-ng, is this not something that GOS could provide instructions on building? Not very streamlined that's for sure, but something.
@fireborn I would need to check with them to see what they're using nowadays. They've told us that options like RHVoice and eSpeak NG aren't actually usable in practice, and they are likely using Google's app for this for their day-to-day.
As far as maintaining your own build with something like eSpeak NG goes, I don't assume that it would differ a lot from bundling any other app in a custom GrapheneOS build. If someone wanted to do that, they should be able to do it with relative ease, but at the end of the day, the solution needs to be something we can actually ship in official builds.
@matchboxbananasynergy it does, but a guide in the mean-time on how to package it yourself would go a long way towards making the process at least doable. I don't know, I personally use espeak every day and don't really plan on using anything else. Espeak can reach higher speech rates than most other things while still remaining understandable, and I don't like tts options with inflection that changes in the way that neural tts does.
@fireborn We can consider this, we do have https://grapheneos.org/build today which guides you through making your own GrapheneOS build.