arXiv:2609.22697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, text-to-speech systems have made significant progress in speech expressiveness and controllability. However, the speaking style of generated...
arXiv:2606. 03957v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational ASR for lower-resource languages and niche domains is limited by the scarcity of domain-matched multi-speaker training data.
arXiv:2608. 11590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human voice generation has made rapid progress in speech generation, singing voice generation, voice cloning, and voice editing.
TalkFa introduces a unified benchmark for Farsi dialogue generation and understanding, comprising three datasets: WIKI‑FADIAL (4.2K Wikipedia‑grounded dialogues), DAILYDIALOG‑FA (6.6K dialogues with dialogue‑act and emotion annotations), and PLAYDIAL‑FA (2.1K theatrical dialogues with sentiment labels). All dialogues are curated through multi‑stage review by native speakers, ensuring high quality. Experiments show that LoRA fine‑tuning improves generation performance with less data, while specific models excel on classification tasks, and human evaluation confirms the benchmark’s reliability.
Conversational ASR for lower-resource languages and niche domains is limited by the scarcity of domain-matched multi-speaker training data. We propose an augmentation pipeline that generates scenario-level dialogues with participant metadata, maps speaker attributes to TTS voice profiles, and assembles synthesized utterances into speaker-aware simulated conversations.
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.
The paper introduces a method called randomized intermediate guidance for training tandem speech-to-speech models, where a large language model (LLM) acts as a backend providing candidate responses while the user is speaking. Instead of simulating the backend’s guidance, the approach derives guidance directly from the conversation corpus, using target responses for informative guidance and randomly sampled responses to simulate irrelevant updates. Experiments on synthetic dialogues and 3.8k hours of real conversations show that this technique yields response quality comparable to LLM-generated baselines while improving natural turn‑taking and audio‑judge naturalness.
VoiceLongMemEval (VLME) is a new benchmark that tests AI assistants on their ability to remember how users sounded by incorporating paralinguistic metadata—such as emotion labels, prosody descriptors, and voice events—into each conversational turn. The benchmark uses a three‑stage adversarial gate to ensure that models cannot succeed with transcript alone, revealing a significant affect gap: models gain 0.09 to 0.38 accuracy when provided with paralinguistic cues, and audio‑native models outperform standard ASR pipelines in extracting these signals. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.
SteerDuplex is a full‑duplex speech dialogue model that can be steered along attributes such as tone, persona, speaking rate, and voice style in response to user instructions. The authors introduce a taxonomy of text‑ and audio‑based steerability, identify gaps in existing models, and fine‑tune a Moshi‑based model with reinforcement learning to improve timing and response continuity. They also present SteerBench, a benchmark of 390 spoken prompts and 1,067 human‑authored rubrics, showing significant gains in audio‑steering pass rates and interruption handling compared to open baselines.
arXiv:2606. 07547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-based large language models are typically constrained to spoken replies, which limits their user-facing outputs to what can be verbalized and suppresses text-native capabilities such as code generation, structured analysis, and multi-step reasoning in realtime interaction, for tasks that require persistent, structured, and inspectable intermediate outputs.
The paper introduces Prosodic Adjustment with Conversational Context (PACC), a deep‑learning method that converts read speech into natural conversational speech. PACC analyzes and modifies prosodic features—intonation, stress, and rhythm—using HiFi‑GAN for synthesis, aiming to preserve naturalness and intelligibility while keeping computational load low for real‑time use. Experiments show significant improvements in speech conversion, higher model accuracy, and better Mean Opinion Score (MOS) results, establishing new benchmarks for the task.
RoleBreak is an open benchmark designed to evaluate long‑horizon role‑playing robustness in spoken dialogue systems. It includes 310 character‑based and user‑centered roles, 6,688 human‑verified dialogue turns, and 11,743 fine‑grained evaluation criteria, with 1,856 turns specifically targeting expressive vocal emotion. The benchmark stresses role consistency, interaction quality, safety, and affect over extended conversations, and the authors evaluated nine system configurations across full‑duplex, omni‑modal, and cascaded ASR–LLM–TTS paradigms.