I found that it's much easier for me to read and remember when reading with voice assistant for which I need real-time. Ages ago I bought Ivona Text-to-speech and was serving me very well for many years. The last few years I used AWS Polly and espeak (using this https://github.com/laszukdawid/cracker) but thought that there must be something better.
There seems to be a fairly wide selection between state of the art and just glueing together a bunch of phonemes it’s just that tortoise-tts is up there with the state of the art.
I haven’t looked into the mid range stuff but there’s probably something out there with pretty good quality if you don’t mind doing some coding, end user applications seem to be mostly in the startup SaaS charge by the character domain.
