Hugging Face Blog

TTS Arena: Benchmarking Text-to-Speech Models in the Wild

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 2

Efficient ASR Training with Conversations that Never Happened

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 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 AI
Aug 25

Do Spoken Language Models Hear Speech as They Read Text? Bridging Structural Gaps Between Speech and Text

The paper investigates how Spoken Language Models (SLMs) process speech compared to text, noting that current SLMs show weak alignment between speech and text representations despite strong downstream performance. The authors propose a framework that separates length mismatch from semantic alignment to better match speech and text representations. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that this approach yields competitive results against strong baselines, highlighting the need to explicitly address structural differences between speech and text in SLM training.

By Hyeonyu Kim, Hwayeon Kim, Youngwon Choi, Myeongkyun Cho, Huu-Kim Nguyen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

DiscoPhon: Benchmarking the Unsupervised Discovery of Phoneme Inventories With Discrete Speech Units

DiscoPhon is a multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate unsupervised phoneme discovery from discrete speech units. It includes 6 development and 6 test languages that cover a wide range of phonemic contrasts, and requires systems to generate discrete units mapped to a predefined phoneme inventory using only 10 hours of speech from an unseen language. The benchmark assesses unit quality, recognition, and segmentation, and provides four pretrained multilingual HuBERT and SpidR baselines that demonstrate current models can produce units that correlate well with phonemes, though performance varies across languages.

By Maxime Poli, Manel Khentout, Angelo Ortiz Tandazo, Ewan Dunbar, Emmanuel Chemla, Emmanuel Dupoux
arXiv AI
Jun 9

GenTSE: Enhancing Target Speaker Extraction via a Coarse-to-Fine Generative Language Model

arXiv:2512. 20978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language Model (LM)-based generative modeling has emerged as a promising direction for TSE, offering potential for improved generalization and high-fidelity speech.

By Haoyang Li, Xuyi Zhuang, Azmat Adnan, Ye Ni, Wei Rao, Shreyas Gopal, Eng Siong Chng, Boon Siew Han, Yuanjin Zheng
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