Since August of this year, I discovered Japanese TTS, well the paid variety since they sound a bit more natural and in some cases, handles the word’s reading properly. I shared a comparison of all three of the most popular talking voice synthesizers for Japanese (A.I.Voice, Cevio AI, and VoicePeak) on my personal blog. These are purchasable through DLSite.
While I wasn’t impressed with A.I.Voice because of the engine noise the lack of pause between sentences, it improved with A.I.Voice2, which came out recently and finally have macOS support. It can use the previous version A.I.Voice Voice Banks (on Mac, you will need to install them on the PC first and copy the voice data to the Mac, but it works. AIVoice Gumi worked without any issues). I think AIVoice2 and Voicepeak work better for large amount of text. If you want to listen to an article, you can just copy and paste it into the program and play it back.
I felt that I neglected the listening aspect of JLPT, so maybe I need to practice some more using VoicePeak and AIVoice2, in addition to watching JDramas, playing visual novels, watching Seiyuu programs, and more. Hopefully whatever I got on the N2, I will work on for the next attempt in 2024.
Of course, to make content too, since I need to work on output too.
Only bringing this up now since they are on sale until the end of this month.