Don’t have any recommendations you haven’t mentioned. As a blind person I listen to synthesized speech nearly all day long, so I’m pretty good at catching AI voices. I think the ones trained on IRL people have a “choppy” or “quavering” quality. I’m not an audiophile or computational linguist so I’m sure there’s a term for this I’m missing, but the overall audio has a particular tell to it.

It’s getting harder, though. Now I listen for things like odd prosidy, stuff like odd pauses or inflections or inconsistent pronunciations.

For example, the phrase “So I went to the store” could have a number of inflections that encode info about the ongoing conversation, whether I intend to continue speaking or whether I’m yielding the floor, whether I’m asking a question, indicating surprise, etc. AI is getting better at this but it’s not perfect.

Pronunciation of proper nouns or words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently in different contexts is a good indicator. Just the other day my mom was watching some AI-generated listicle and the voiceover mispronounced the name of a city after correctly pronouncing it every time before.

I just hated my old job (inbound call center agent) so hard that any anxiety about going back to school was overshadowed by relief at not having to talk nonstop 8 hours a day again.

Unfortunately I’m at a bit of a crossroads with my current job (IT) because both Pearson and Cisco make test-taking miserable if you have a disability. My current job isn’t under threat, but I let all my certs lapse because I’m just sick and tired of their nonsense.