arXiv Computation and Language

EZ-Ar-VC: Robust Arabic Voice Anonymization with Generalization across Dialects and Code-Switching

The paper introduces EZ-Ar-VC, an Arabic-focused voice conversion model designed for robust voice anonymization across dialects and code-switching. It evaluates existing zero-shot VC systems, finds they poorly preserve Arabic pronunciation, and then trains EZ-VC on diverse Arabic speech to achieve strong intelligibility, naturalness, and speaker dissimilarity. Subjective tests confirm its effectiveness even for underrepresented dialects and mixed-language contexts.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

PHONOS: PHOnetic Neutralization for Online Streaming Applications

PHONOS is a real‑time streaming module for speaker anonymization that neutralizes accent cues by converting non‑native segmental realizations toward a target accent domain. It uses pre‑generated golden utterances that preserve timbre and rhythm, aligning them with silence‑aware DTW and applying zero‑shot voice conversion to supervise a causal accent translator. The system achieves an 81% reduction in non‑native accent confidence, improves accentedness ratings, reduces speaker linkability in embedding space, and operates with ≤241 ms end‑to‑end latency on a single GPU.

By Waris Quamer, Mu-Ruei Tseng, Ghady Nasrallah, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Your Voice Cloning System is Secretly a Voice Anonymizer

The paper demonstrates that the multilingual voice cloning model XTTSv2 can be repurposed for speaker anonymization without retraining. By conditioning on a pseudo-speaker and using an iterative refinement strategy, the authors balance privacy and intelligibility, achieving near‑optimal privacy (EER ≈ 0.49) and competitive speech quality across seven European languages. The method outperforms dedicated anonymization baselines and requires no language‑specific training.

By Romolo Muletta, Felix Matthias Saaro, Mark Cieliebak, Jan Deriu
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

GigaSpeech 3: Scaling Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Recognition with Weakly Labeled Data

GigaSpeech 3 is a new Arabic speech corpus comprising 39,000 hours and 10 million weakly transcribed segments across Algerian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Saudi, and Syrian dialects. It is built from 60 hours of manual transcription per dialect, using self‑supervised labeling models and noisy‑student refinement to produce high‑quality data. The corpus enables dialect‑specific and multi‑dialect speech recognition models that outperform existing third‑party systems, achieving a macro‑average word error rate of 23.86% for dialect‑specific models and 25.51% for a multi‑dialect model.

By Junzhe Liu, Yujie Tu, Yifan Yang, Peng Wang, Haoran Wang, Guodong Lin, Leyan Liao, Chengquan Zhang, Zhifu Gao, Xiangang Li, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Kai Yu, Xie Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Bulbul: A Dataset for Dialectal Arabic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2608.21950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) faces unique challenges due to diglossia, extensive regional dialect variation, and limited speech resource...

By Ahmed Ashraf, Aisha Alansari, Fadel Al Abbas, Nada Almarwani, Samah Aloufi, Saad Ezzini, Maged S. Al-Shaibani, Doaa Dalaq, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Mohamed Mehdi Trigui, Dania Refai, Layan Refai, Mohamed Akrout, Mustafa Jarrar, Wasfi G. Al-Khatib, Alaa Dalaq, Darin El-Nakla, Samir Abdaljalil, Abdulrahman Al-Fakih, Nour El Imane Zeghib, Moussa Redah, Salmane Chafik, Mohamed El-Attar, Rima Grati, Sarah Kohail, Malak Alkhorasani, Khadijah Al Safwan, Ismail M. Mudhaffar, Ali Altam, Ahmed Al-Shaikh, Adnan Saeed, Hamzah Luqman
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Exploiting Acoustic and Content-Oriented Speaker Verification Attacks Against Multilingual Voice Anonymization

The paper investigates how acoustic and content-oriented speaker verification attacks perform against multilingual voice anonymization. It evaluates both attacker types on anonymized speech, builds a multilingual voice-converted dataset to enhance cross‑lingual generalization, and finds that attack success depends on how much linguistic utility is preserved. Acoustic‑oriented attacks generally outperform content‑oriented ones, but the performance gap narrows when linguistic information is well maintained, and the new dataset improves results while reducing cross‑lingual disparities.

By Ridwan Arefeen, Ze Li, Rong Tong, Ming Li, Xiaoxiao Miao
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Anonymization, Not Elimination: Utility-Preserved Speech Anonymization

The paper introduces a two‑stage speech anonymization framework that preserves both linguistic content and acoustic identity. It replaces personally identifiable information using a generative editing model and applies a flow‑matching anonymization technique (F3‑VA) to create diverse, distinct anonymized speakers. The authors evaluate privacy with speaker verification metrics and utility by training ASR, TTS, and SER models from scratch, showing stronger privacy protection with minimal utility loss compared to existing baselines.

By Yunchong Xiao, Yuxiang Zhao, Ziyang Ma, Shuai Wang, Kai Yu, Jiachun Liao, Xie Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Listen to the Features: Voice Anonymization Driven by Content Embedding Matching over Signal Reconstruction

arXiv:2607. 09767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The paper presents a voice anonymization model focusing on preserving content rather than producing realistic speech.

By Adrien Schneider (M-PSI), Kacper Zabkowski (M-PSI), Anderson Augusma (M-PSI), Fr\'ed\'erique Letu\'e (SAM, SVH), Maria Camila Pinzon (M-PSI), Dominique Vaufreydaz (M-PSI)
arXiv AI
Sep 21

MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs

MENASpeechBank is a new reference voice bank that provides about 18,000 high‑quality utterances from 124 speakers across multiple MENA countries, covering English, Modern Standard Arabic, and regional Arabic varieties. The dataset is built through a controllable pipeline that creates persona profiles inspired by the World Values Survey, defines a taxonomy of roughly 5,000 conversational scenarios, matches personas to scenarios via semantic similarity, and generates around 417,000 role‑play conversations using an LLM. Synthetic speaker‑conditioned user‑turn audio is produced from reference recordings to maintain speaker diversity, and both synthetic and human‑recorded conversations are evaluated and analyzed for quality.

By Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Rabindra Nath Nandi, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam