Neural TTS systems can sound natural across languages, but naturalness does not guarantee the preservation of sound contrasts that distinguish words from their grammatical forms. Standard metrics like MOS do not test for this.
arXiv:2607. 01965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural TTS systems can sound natural across languages, but naturalness does not guarantee the preservation of sound contrasts that distinguish words from their grammatical forms.
arXiv:2606. 17835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study examines the extent to which the wav2vec2.
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.
arXiv:2606. 07030v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyse error patterns of raw waveform acoustic models on TIMIT phone recognition beyond the overall phone error rate (PER).
The paper introduces a token‑level extension of Omni‑Temporal Classification (OTC) for automatic speech recognition, allowing unsupported tokens to be bypassed while preserving supervision for the rest of the word. Across 19 languages and three corpora, this token‑level OTC consistently outperforms standard CTC, achieving the lowest mean word error rate on every dataset and a 9.45% average relative WER reduction. A predictive‑entropy‑indexed schedule replaces epoch‑based relaxation, reducing training‑length dependence while maintaining performance.
arXiv:2608. 01281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Phoneme-based multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) can share acoustic evidence across languages more directly than language-specific subword modeling.
The paper evaluates bias in phoneme-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, focusing on WhisperIPA and ZIPA, which produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions. Using multilingual speech corpora and demographically annotated English datasets, the authors compare model-generated IPA against grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) outputs with both standard phoneme error rate (PER) and a new Soft PER metric that allows linguistically similar substitutions. The study finds persistent disparities across language, gender, accent, ethnicity, and age, even when accounting for acceptable phonemic variation.
arXiv:2606. 16019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expert phonetic annotation is costly, especially for non-standard dialects and atypical speech.
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.
arXiv:2606. 11542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern pretrained self-supervised automatic speech recognition models are trained on large-scale audio data to encode speech into contextualized representations.
HuPER is a human-inspired framework that models phonetic perception as adaptive inference over acoustic‑phonetics evidence and linguistic knowledge. Using only 100 hours of training data, it achieves state‑of‑the‑art phonetic error rates on five English benchmarks and demonstrates strong zero‑shot transfer to 95 unseen languages. It uniquely enables adaptive, multi‑path phonetic perception across diverse acoustic conditions, and all training data, models, and code are open‑sourced.
The paper introduces a unified phoneme‑based TTS‑to‑ASR augmentation pipeline that uses a multilingual TTS model with language‑ID conditioning and incorporates grapheme‑to‑phoneme conversion, reference‑speech filtering, and candidate‑text selection. It proposes phoneme‑frequency‑guided selection (PFGS) to rank sentences based on phoneme frequencies from real ASR labels, and demonstrates that random augmentation and PFGS both improve ASR performance across Arabic, French, Italian, and Portuguese test sets, with PFGS yielding up to a 19.3% relative WER reduction. The study also shows that filtering reference speech can further lower WER by up to 0.59 points on certain datasets.