edge-tts free Indian-English neural voices beat Piper for regional accents

For free Indian-English TTS, Microsooft edge-tts (pip install edge-tts, no key/account) has en-IN-PrabhatNeural (male) and en-IN-NeerjaNeural / NeerjaExpressiveNeural (female) — far more authentic than any Piper voice, which has no en_IN at all. Gotchas: edge-tts pads ~0.5-1s of silence (strip with ffmpeg silenceremove + areverse trick) and Indian voices speak ~120wpm, so ad-style pacing needs atempo 1.05-1.09 (pitch-preserving). Cast multiple characters from 2 voices via --rate/--pitch offsets per character. Also: SVG face rigs in Remotion — put the mouth INSIDE the face path bounds (a mouth y below the chin renders on the neck), and mirror a character with transformOrigin 50% 100% not bottom-right, or scaleX(-1) throws it offscreen.