is there some list of offline-only text-to-speech tools one could peruse if they were looking for a voice for themself 
better question: is there any text to speech that doesn't use neural networks or other types of classic or newly-labelled AI or did that stop with dectalk?
yes i expect worse sounding results
@mavica_again classic mac MacinTalk
@atax1a is there any way to customise the voices or are you stuck with that selection
@mavica_again theres some tools out there to insert new pronunciations and such, but the voices only have like, a rate parameter. conceivably one could write a new voice but idk where to start on that
@atax1a sounds not too dissimilar to dectalk (and from what i remember it sounding like, they're probably using dectalk as a starting point)
difference is i don't think there's a way to get macintalk on a modern windows computer without emulating a whole macintosh is there? i already have a command line dectalk so this doesn't help much
@atax1a by which i mean, if i wanted something that sounds like dectalk and needs arcane controls to make it sound different, i already have that
i'm looking for other options newer/better than dectalk and it looks like there's just no such thing without getting into sampled or AI territory
@mavica_again the early-2000s windows software we were thinking of was called AT&T Natural Voices — i'm sure newer versions probably have picked up the AI taint, but yeah i think there isn't much out there that's better for your purposes than dectalk
@mavica_again nope, at least not yet. the voices are more whimsical though.
we ALSO remember some windows
product from AT&T but that was a long time ago and we can't recall anything besides its stuffy british pronunciation
@mavica_again it looks like you can also vary the pitch at runtime, and embed control codes — https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/SpeechSynthesisProgrammingGuide/FineTuning/FineTuning.html