Solved Any Recommendations for Good Offline Text-to-Speech Converter?

I have a text file that I am keenly interested in converting to speech. After an attempt to do this online I decided that the 'free' online trash was just a scam to get money out of folks – limitations abound as carrots to go 'Pro'. So I looked for an offline downloadable app. Found this one here which works quite well, but choice of voices is limited. However, the interface is in German (I speak English). I googled for translations of the German so I can work with the GUI (mostly). But I'm finding the app a bit buggy.

Does anyone have any recommendations for good genuinely free offline TTS converters that they have used? I don't want any offers of such apps that can be downloaded but you have to pay to go 'Pro'.

Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program.

Thank you FreeBooter! I have downloaded and quickly tested Balabolka, works fine so far. Only downside is that it is limited to default voices on Windows 11 of "Microsoft Hazel Desktop (English UK)" and "Microsoft Zira Desktop (English US)".

Do you, or anyone else, know of anywhere where I can get other voices for free and for offline use?

Sadly paid software like TextAloud software should have this feature.

Okay thank you FreeBooter. I found one Scottish voice Stuart, I like at a company called CrereProc but it costs money, you have to register an account with them, and the licence is only for one machine. Also to install the voice to Windows you have to use their app. In all it pretty much representative of software companies pushing to subscriptions to software and compulsory internet connects to install and use the software. So I'll avoid all that an just be happy with what I have.

Thanks again.

You are very welcome!

I stumbled on this older post a while ago, Balabolka while free is definitely not good enough compared to todays standards, it can run Azure Cloud TTS (which is not that great either) but then it's not free and not local anymore.
Maybe this helps others:
After spending a lot of time, the best software on the market today is demodokos foundry but it's only sometimes free (check for the free license, sometimes advertised), it was not available when I started it. You can upload an entire ebook and it will create a multi speaker emotional output that's not different to a real voice actor.
If you do not need emotional output, the best option is chatterbox 2. That's completely open source, I used it before Demodokos. It provides good voices - close to humans. It needs some python tinkering and does not work if you want to control emotions or styles. But once you have it running, it can work well.
It also speaks german quite well but when I used it that was unofficial.

Chatterbox can be a bit though to run, there is also Kokoros, it's very light on hardware. Demododkos needs a GPU, Chatterbox is gruesome slow without GPU but Kokoros can run on CPU quite well. It also sounds good.

These days everything is better than what you got with balabolka