Great point! these are better than Samantha and they're free. But still, if I could wait a few seconds to get a much richer TTS experience I'd pay for that.
Who is going to hack together a mac widget that allows us to select text anywhere, press a shortcut key and finally get a non robotic voice outputted in a reasonable amount of time?
I am aware of the Option + Esc shortcut on osx for the onboard TTS but wow is it hard to listen to in 2026.
When the harnesses commoditize, it will be the dynamic things like skills that will be the most valuable, useful thing you can bring to a harness. That seems like a long ways away though. There are still meaningful performance differences between agent harnesses.
“America is in decline” is the consensus view. America dominating on all fronts is the contrarian view. I expect these views to swing like a pendulum in public discussion until something meaningful happens or until it’s clear in the rearview that America is in fact is more like UK, Japan, or Germany.