Let's talk About TTS - Helpful Tool or Plain Old Blockchain Spam?

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Just about everyone on Steem has probably gotten a couple of comments from the @tts account, which converts their articles with text-to-speech to an audio file. I'm a little bit on the fence regarding whether I actually like it or not and looking through all @tts's comments, I think people are usually either for it or against it. Some people downvote most of these comments, while some people actually give it an upvote.

I must admit that i sometimes get a little bit annoyed by all the useless comments I receive on my blogs. Not just from TTS, but from every service I've delegated to. Now that we're in #newsteem, I think it's actually time to pull back some of my delegations from projects that engage in spam like this. TTS is a little bit different, they're supposedly providing you with a somewhat usable service. Though is that really the case? Let's look at the facts!

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No Changes or Upgrades

TTS hasn't really changed anything since they first launched their service, their introduction post is 2 years old and they haven't posted anything else in the meantime.

The quality of their text-to-speech is nothing to write home about, I don't really find the voice appealing and they do not offer any options to change it. I also suspect that they might compress the audio files a bit too much, since there are a lot of audio artifacts present on the recording (the background noise you hear).

I really wonder if some people actually use it regularly, since it gets really annoying to listen to the recordings for an extended period of time. Maybe if they expanded the features a little bit and gave regular updates, I would actually want to use it.

No Use for the Visually Impaired

For a long time, I thought it might actually be helpful for visually impaired people and I'd upvote a couple of their comments because I'd want to support a service like that. Now after thinking a bit longer on that, I realized that visually impaired people would have absolutely no use for this particular service.

They tend to use their own software or devices that have been developed specifically for them. These tools tend to work for every website, so there's absolutely no need for a service as TTS.

I'm glad that TTS didn't market themselves as a service for the visually impaired, so they're not being dishonest in that regard.

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Conclusion

In its current state, I don't think TTS deserves to get any upvotes. It's a lazy attempt to get some form of income on Steem by providing a service that looks useful on the outside, but when you look further into it, it's actually not.

If their service was actually improved upon, I might change my mind. They're not the only service that has created something, only to forgo on development, but it's definitely one of the most visible ones.

So, what do you think about all those @tts comments on your blogs? Do you like them or do you consider them to be spam?