The speech synthesis is impressive. It's still clearly a computer, but the prosody is a step up from Google and Bing. I threw some random comments I've written at the English Female voice model. It seems capable of contrasting clauses via rising and falling (and handles patterns like "On the other hand, ..." and "She was either ..., or .... when ..." well), makes little dramatic pauses after noun clusters to allow the listener to catch up, inserted a little mental comma into stuff like "greater than x [,] half the time", put emphasis on an "and" after a comma ("[...] something I still haven't gotten used, and am not sure I want to") etc., lots of traits of an aware speaker. Heck, I almost felt like it picked up speed and layered in an ounce of incredulity when it was reading a rant I wrote, but it might just be good enough that I can project into it on that one.
I copy pasted your paragraph into the TTS. I like it very much, but it might just be on the level of Alex from Mac OS.
> it might just be good enough that I can <project> into it on that one.
Funny. It doesn't stress <project> as a verb, but as a noun, making the whole phrase mean something else.
Alex has a list of words like that too: live (to live) and live (live concert), progress (also verb and substantive), record, suspect and a bunch of other words that have multiple pronunciations based on the surrounding words (they are called homophones).
They should add homophone disambiguation - probably solvable with a classifier based on features extracted from surrounding words and POS tagging.
Speech to Text: https://speech-to-text-demo.mybluemix.net
Text to Speech: http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net