arXiv Machine Learning

Is Natural Always Appropriate? Investigating Naturalness and Appropriateness Across Different Domains for TTS Evaluation

arXiv:2606. 31729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-speech (TTS) evaluation is an open challenge.

arXiv AI
Aug 11

Beyond Naturalness: Probing Automated Text-To-Speech Evaluators on Linguistically Grounded Dimensions

arXiv:2608. 09930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation methods (Mean Opinion Score (MOS) predictors and Audio Large Language Models (Audio-LLM) judges) are expected to reflect human perception, yet it is unclear how well they capture the distinct aspects of speech that listeners actually perceive.

By Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Simon Rosen, Jash Shah, Lindsay Devon Brin, Hoang H Nguyen, Anke Koelzer, Rachel Hansen, Tara Bogavelli, Fanny Riols
arXiv AI
Jul 17

RW-Voice-EQ Bench: A Real World Benchmark for Evaluating Voice AI Systems

arXiv:2607. 14846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current voice AI benchmarks typically evaluate isolated capabilities such as speech intelligibility, word error rate, or text-based dialogue quality, but they rarely test whether systems harness the acoustic information that distinguishes spoken language from its textual representation.

By David Ayllon, Alice Baird, Jeffrey Brooks, Franc Camps-Febrer, Jakub Piotr C{\l}apa, Theo Lebryk, Jens Madsen, Olya Ossipova, Sharath Rao, Hoon Shin, Tigran Soghbatyan, Georg Streich, Rashish Tandon, Panagiotis Tzirakis
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Human or Machine? A Preliminary Turing Test for Speech-to-Speech Interaction

The paper reports the first Turing test for speech‑to‑speech systems, gathering 2,968 human judgments on conversations between nine state‑of‑the‑art S2S systems and 28 humans. None of the evaluated systems passed the test, highlighting a clear gap in human‑likeness. The authors diagnose the failure with an 18‑dimension taxonomy, finding that paralinguistic cues, emotional expressivity, and conversational persona—not semantic understanding—are the main bottlenecks, and they propose an interpretable model for automatic human‑vs‑machine discrimination.

By Xiang Li, Jiabao Gao, Sipei Lin, Xuan Zhou, Chi Zhang, Bo Cheng, Jiale Han, Benyou Wang
arXiv AI
Jun 24

ZONOS2 Technical Report

arXiv:2606. 24320v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present ZONOS2 8B, our latest TTS model, which achieves state-of-the-art naturalness, prosody, and voice cloning fidelity.

By Gabriel Clark, Sofian Mejjoute, Mohamed Osman, George Close, Beren Millidge
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

A Cross Community Agenda for Speech AI

arXiv:2609.13168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech AI, any AI system that recognizes, transforms, or generates speech, is built and evaluated across two communities with only a small overlap: t...

By Maria Teleki, Kimi Wenzel, Anna Seo Gyeong Choi, Tobias Weinberg, Shree Harsha Bokkahalli Satish, Stephanny Sanchez, Belu Ticona, Ariadna Sanchez, Yash Sonkar, Aarti Mathur, Christoph Minixhofer, Abraham Glasser, Raja Kushalnagar, James Caverlee, Minha Lee, Shaomei Wu, Alyssa Hillary Zisk, \'Eva Sz\'ekely, Dylan Gaines, Angelika Seeschaaf Veres, Seray Ibrahim, Nicholas Cummins, Allison Koenecke