arXiv Computation and Language

Your Voice Cloning System is Secretly a Voice Anonymizer

The paper demonstrates that the multilingual voice cloning model XTTSv2 can be repurposed for speaker anonymization without retraining. By conditioning on a pseudo-speaker and using an iterative refinement strategy, the authors balance privacy and intelligibility, achieving near‑optimal privacy (EER ≈ 0.49) and competitive speech quality across seven European languages. The method outperforms dedicated anonymization baselines and requires no language‑specific training.

arXiv AI
Oct 7

Voice "Cloning" is Style Transfer

arXiv:2605.16578v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificially generated speech is increasingly embedded in everyday life. Voice cloning in particular enables applications where identity pres...

By Kaitlyn Zhou, Federico Bianchi, Martijn Bartelds, Anna Pot, Yongchan Kwon, James Zou
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Anonymization, Not Elimination: Utility-Preserved Speech Anonymization

The paper introduces a two‑stage speech anonymization framework that preserves both linguistic content and acoustic identity. It replaces personally identifiable information using a generative editing model and applies a flow‑matching anonymization technique (F3‑VA) to create diverse, distinct anonymized speakers. The authors evaluate privacy with speaker verification metrics and utility by training ASR, TTS, and SER models from scratch, showing stronger privacy protection with minimal utility loss compared to existing baselines.

By Yunchong Xiao, Yuxiang Zhao, Ziyang Ma, Shuai Wang, Kai Yu, Jiachun Liao, Xie Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

PHONOS: PHOnetic Neutralization for Online Streaming Applications

PHONOS is a real‑time streaming module for speaker anonymization that neutralizes accent cues by converting non‑native segmental realizations toward a target accent domain. It uses pre‑generated golden utterances that preserve timbre and rhythm, aligning them with silence‑aware DTW and applying zero‑shot voice conversion to supervise a causal accent translator. The system achieves an 81% reduction in non‑native accent confidence, improves accentedness ratings, reduces speaker linkability in embedding space, and operates with ≤241 ms end‑to‑end latency on a single GPU.

By Waris Quamer, Mu-Ruei Tseng, Ghady Nasrallah, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Listen to the Features: Voice Anonymization Driven by Content Embedding Matching over Signal Reconstruction

arXiv:2607. 09767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The paper presents a voice anonymization model focusing on preserving content rather than producing realistic speech.

By Adrien Schneider (M-PSI), Kacper Zabkowski (M-PSI), Anderson Augusma (M-PSI), Fr\'ed\'erique Letu\'e (SAM, SVH), Maria Camila Pinzon (M-PSI), Dominique Vaufreydaz (M-PSI)
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

DiffAnon: Diffusion-based Prosody Control for Voice Anonymization

DiffAnon is a diffusion‑based voice anonymization method that uses classifier‑free guidance to give users continuous, inference‑time control over how much prosody is preserved. By refining acoustic detail over semantic embeddings from an RVQ codec, the model allows smooth interpolation between strong anonymization and high prosodic fidelity within a single architecture. This is the first framework to provide structured, interpolatable prosody control while maintaining competitive privacy and utility across different operating points.

By Ismail Rasim Ulgen, Zexin Cai, Nicholas Andrews, Philipp Koehn, Berrak Sisman
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Exploiting Acoustic and Content-Oriented Speaker Verification Attacks Against Multilingual Voice Anonymization

The paper investigates how acoustic and content-oriented speaker verification attacks perform against multilingual voice anonymization. It evaluates both attacker types on anonymized speech, builds a multilingual voice-converted dataset to enhance cross‑lingual generalization, and finds that attack success depends on how much linguistic utility is preserved. Acoustic‑oriented attacks generally outperform content‑oriented ones, but the performance gap narrows when linguistic information is well maintained, and the new dataset improves results while reducing cross‑lingual disparities.

By Ridwan Arefeen, Ze Li, Rong Tong, Ming Li, Xiaoxiao Miao
arXiv AI
Sep 4

VoxPrivacy: A Benchmark for Evaluating Interactional Privacy of Speech Language Models

The paper introduces VoxPrivacy, a benchmark for assessing interactional privacy in Speech Language Models (SLMs). It evaluates models on a 32‑hour bilingual dataset across three difficulty tiers, revealing that most open‑source SLMs perform near random on conditional privacy decisions and even strong closed‑source systems struggle with proactive privacy inference. The authors also validate these findings on a real‑speech subset and show that fine‑tuning on a 4,000‑hour training set can improve privacy‑preserving capabilities while maintaining robustness.

By Yuxiang Wang, Hongyu Liu, Dekun Chen, Xueyao Zhang, Zhizheng Wu
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 Machine Learning
Jul 27

Synthetic Speech, Real Signal: Paralinguistic Preservation and Cross-Lingual Augmentation via Voice Cloning

arXiv:2607. 22304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic data augmentation in speech is common practice for linguistic tasks like ASR, but has seen far less work for paralinguistic ones, especially clinical tasks where labelled data is expensive and some patient groups are underrepresented.

By Roseline Polle, Owen Parsons, George Fairs, Luis Miguel San Martin Fernandez, Cole Looney, Xiaoliang Wu, Alexandra Livia Georgescu, Stefano Goria