Yeah, text-to-speech is and has been easy for ages; I'm pretty sure I used espeak like a decade ago. On the other hand, I have tried... pretty much all the big names in speech-to-text, without success, or at best "I kind of got the demo to work but couldn't figure out how to do anything useful with it". Kaldi, sphinx, julius, a handful of tiny PoC things I found online... maybe I'm just bad at following instructions, or I'm trying to do something that they're not trying to optimize for, but I have not had a good time.