Ken Starks and the text-to-speech dilemma

Joey Hess did a successful Kickstarter for git-annex[1] development and also did a campaign[2] for further development. Now it seems the NSF and DataLad are funding[3] git-annex development. Something with more wide-spread interest such as good TTS could certainly get bootstrapped in a similar way.

[1]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assi...
[2]https://campaign.joeyh.name/
[3]https://git-annex.branchable.com/thanks/