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Text to speech is for when the audiobook doesn't exist. Ray Kurzweil first did this in the late 1970s for the blind with the groundbreaking OCR he developed. It's not much better nearly 50 years later.
Sadly while there are more natural voices its still hugely inferior to real audio books because there has been almost no progress since the late 1980s.
It's been available free on Windows since XP. For free on Android and Linux (and included for years). Probably on Mac OS and iOS free. I'd be really really surprised if Amazon's Echo or any paid 3rd part Text to Speech has little more than a nicer or different choice of "voices".
The PW4 and PW3 text to speech sounds a bit nicer than 2002 XP or the Kindle DXG, but it's no "smarter". Still no real parsing and little improved from 1980s Text to speech in terms of emotion, dialog vs spoken text and other parsing and meta quality features that a real human reader has.
Real Audio books are more or less worth it, if the title is available. Text to speech is for when there is no alternative.
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