Qwen3 TTS is seriously underrated - I got it running locally in real-time and it's one of the most expressive open TTS models I've tried

Heya guys and gals, Around a year ago I released and posted about Persona Engine as a fun side project, trying to get the whole ASR -> LLM -> TTS pipeline going fully locally while having a realtime avatar that is lip-synced (think VTuber). I was able to achieve this and was super happy with the result, but the TTS for me was definitely lacking, since I was using Sesame at the time as reference. After that I took a long break. A week or two ago, I thought to give the project a refresh, and al