MENASpeechBank is a new reference voice bank that provides about 18,000 high‑quality utterances from 124 speakers across multiple MENA countries, covering English, Modern Standard Arabic, and regional Arabic varieties. The dataset is built through a controllable pipeline that creates persona profiles inspired by the World Values Survey, defines a taxonomy of roughly 5,000 conversational scenarios, matches personas to scenarios via semantic similarity, and generates around 417,000 role‑play conversations using an LLM. Synthetic speaker‑conditioned user‑turn audio is produced from reference recordings to maintain speaker diversity, and both synthetic and human‑recorded conversations are evaluated and analyzed for quality.
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.
Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) have substantially improved speech quality and voice cloning fidelity. However, many zero-shot TTS systems still depend on audio prompt transcripts at inference time.
arXiv:2603.16783v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust voice agents require exposure to the full diversity of how people interact through speech. However, obtaining enough spoken interactions is...
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.
Nuha‑Speech is a new initiative aimed at creating general‑purpose Arabic speech‑large language models (speech‑LLMs). It includes the construction of a large Arabic Speech Question‑Answering corpus with over 1.5 million samples for instruction tuning, supervised fine‑tuning of Qwen‑Omni model variants at various scales, and a systematic evaluation framework with diverse tasks and tailored metrics. The project seeks to establish foundational infrastructure for Arabic speech‑LLMs amid limited Arabic speech resources.
arXiv:2606. 19325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing multi-speaker dialogue systems bind speakers to utterances through structured supervision: per-turn tags, multi-stream transcriptions, or learnable speaker embeddings.
arXiv:2606. 13544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations.
arXiv:2510.10774v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Persian remains substantially underrepresented in open speech-text resources, limiting progress in multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS), speech...
arXiv:2609.24812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Voice provides a natural and immediate interface for AI agents. Many settings in which voice agents could be useful, including meetings, households, an...
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...
Scalable Context Orchestration for Serving LLMs Over Voice presents llmovoice, a middleware that explicitly models voice context—including speaking rate, background noise, and packet loss—to guide large language model responses. By constructing a bounded voice context at each turn, llmovoice improves alignment with user preferences and reduces errors, achieving a 52.4% drop in speaking‑rate alignment error and a 0.9% false‑interruption rate under packet loss. In addition, it cuts model usage costs dramatically, lowering per‑turn cost by up to 24.9× while maintaining 98.7% of baseline answer quality in long sessions.
arXiv:2607. 08111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training target speaker extraction (TSE) models for real conversational mixtures remains challenging because large-scale training corpora and clean target speech for supervision are unavailable.