The only thing funny about mentioning Vocaloid is the fact that Vocaloid synthesis has to be manually pitched, tempod, and toned🤣. Glad you honestly believe capitalists want to invest more on disqualifying tone deafening pitchless speech waveforms.

But please, never stop supporting espeak!

Now, LLM localization is the greater challenge. I highly doubt those, including the classic machine-learning models, can reach N1-level localization quality.

There's no chance it's happening any time soon. Many manga and anime lean heavily on visual context as well as the context of the story in general to clear up situations where the language would otherwise be ambiguous, so until the translation software can also use all of that context it's basically impossible.

It's amusing to me how long people have been saying "yes, AI is crap, but it might not be crap some day, so just you wait!" Despite all the money tech companies have thrown at AI, it's still as crap as it ever was, and I don't see any reason to think it'll get better.

Meanwhile, Crunchyroll doesn't care if it's crap, so long as they can get around the cost of paying humans (which is another can of worms). If they're willing to buy this level of quality, what incentive is there for quality to improve?