What synthetic voice can and cannot do

Text to speech has improved enormously, and the useful question is no longer whether it sounds robotic but whether it sounds right for what you are making.

Where it works well now. Explainer videos, training material, product demonstrations, audiobooks of factual text, announcements, and any narration where the voice is delivering information rather than performing. English quality is very good. Urdu quality is workable and improving, and varies substantially between providers, so test rather than assume.

Where it still falls short. Emotional performance, comedy timing, anything where the delivery is the point, and long form narrative fiction. Listeners detect the flatness over a long recording even when no individual sentence sounds wrong.

The tell is rhythm, not accent. Synthetic voices place emphasis slightly wrongly in long sentences, and the effect accumulates. Short sentences hide it, which is a practical instruction for how to write the script.

What it buys you. Speed, because a script becomes narration in minutes. Consistency across dozens of videos. Easy correction, since changing a word means regenerating one line rather than rerecording a session. And multiple languages from one script.

What it costs. Most good tools are paid, priced per character or per minute. Free tiers are limited and usually watermarked or restricted commercially, so check before building a workflow on one.