can Espeak-ng provide the IPA transcription? or does it produce sound?

I'm surprised traditional NLP being better than ML models for this task, can you point me to a benchmark analysis pointing out that non-neural Espeak-ng is better than ML models?

Also, I asked for a neural model for another reason as well, I still want semantic knowledge present, I want more than pronunciation, but before I use myself as a test subject, I want to make sure I get the proper pronunciation in case the highly speculative "uploading game" works... I don't want to early systematically mis-train myself on pronunciation...