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:2606. 19951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models are widely used as proxy metrics in text-to-speech (TTS) research, yet their ability to capture quality differences beyond acoustic fidelity remains unclear.
By Masato Takagi, Masaya Kawamura, Reo Shimizu, Yuma Shirahata
arXiv:2608.21176v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Automatic speech quality assessment aims to predict Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) consistent with human subjective perception and is essential for evalua...
By Naiyuan Li, Li Dong, Diqun Yan
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:2605. 03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability.
By Van-Phat Thai, Aradhya Dhruv, Duc-Thinh Pham, Sameer Alam
The paper introduces a native-reference phone‑class geometry that measures second‑language pronunciation deviation without needing pronunciation labels, read‑aloud prompts, or matched native recordings. By averaging self‑supervised representations for each phone‑class in a native speech corpus and applying singular value decomposition, the authors create a compact coordinate system. Projecting L2 utterances into this space, they find that distances to native coordinates correlate negatively with holistic speaking proficiency and pronunciation quality, indicating the geometry captures relevant acoustic‑phonetic information for spontaneous L2 speech.
By Tina Raissi, Nhan Phan, Chenxiao Wang, Mikko Kurimo
arXiv:2609.28060v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-supervised speech models encode rich phonetic information, but it remains unclear how to transform this information into interpretable metrics for...
By Tina Raissi, Nhan Phan, Mikko Kurimo
The paper introduces ABX-Accent, a benchmark built on the AESRC dataset that evaluates how well representation learning models adapt to 10 different English accents with less than 10 hours of unlabeled data per accent. It adapts the Zero Resources Challenge ABX metrics for each accent and demonstrates a baseline using adaptive domain normalization to fine‑tune a Contrastive Predictive Coding model, achieving a 23.6% relative improvement on across‑speaker ABX scores compared to non‑adapted models. The dataset and evaluation metrics will be released publicly after the paper is accepted.
By Robin San Roman, Manel Khentout, Tu Anh Nguyen, Paul Michel, Yossi Adi, Emmanuel Dupoux
arXiv:2606. 10213v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech sound disorders affect approximately 44% of Korean pediatric communication disorder cases, yet automated assessment tools for Korean toddler speech remain underdeveloped.
By Diane Myung-kyung Woodbridge, Jee Hyun Suh
arXiv:2606. 19597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mean opinion scores (MOS) are widely used for speech quality assessment, yet scalar labels are sensitive to rater variability and listening test differences.
By Junyi Fan, Donald S. Williamson
The paper introduces ABX-Accent, a benchmark for evaluating how well unsupervised speech representation learning models adapt to new accents. It uses the AESRC dataset with 10 English accents, each providing less than 10 hours of unlabeled data, and adapts the Zero Resources Challenge ABX metrics to these accents. A baseline model employing adaptive domain normalization to fine‑tune a Contrastive Predictive Coding model shows a 23.6% relative improvement on across‑speaker ABX scores compared to non‑adapted models.
arXiv:2603. 10827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech-aware large language models (LLMs) can accept speech inputs, yet their training objectives largely emphasize linguistic content or specific fields such as emotions or the speaker's gender, leaving it unclear whether they encode speaker identity.
By Thomas Thebaud, Yuzhe Wang, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Jesus Villalba-Lopez, Najim Dehak