The paper introduces Speech-Rewarded Style Planning (SRSP), a method that trains a text-based style planner using a frozen downstream TTS model. SRSP generates candidate style instructions from dialogue history and response text, optimizing them with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) where the reward is the teacher‑forced likelihood of target speech tokens. Experiments on an English subset of the ISCSLP 2026 CoT‑TTS corpus show that SRSP outperforms baseline LLM and target‑audio‑informed captioning approaches in speech‑style and emotion similarity, mel‑cepstral distortion, and contextual appropriateness.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates a more effective way to align natural‑language style descriptions with actual acoustic output, improving controllability and fidelity in conversational text‑to‑speech systems."
By Shiao Zhu, Lianbo Liu, Sizhen Lyu, Yuzhe Wang, Sheng Li, Takahiro Shinozaki
SonicCaps is a large-scale audio captioning dataset featuring approximately 15 million captions paired with 700,000 audio clips, created using the Qwen3-Omni multimodal language model. The dataset emphasizes diversity by generating around 24 captions per clip through structured prompt engineering and few-shot generation, covering main descriptions, rephrased variants, and semantic tags. Human evaluations rate SonicCaps higher than existing datasets, and training CLAP models on it improves audio retrieval and zero-shot classification across public and commercial benchmarks.
By Zineb Lahrichi, Marc Ferras, Ga\"el Richard, Geoffroy Peeters
arXiv:2606. 20532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Style-captioned text-to-speech systems use natural language to control voice characteristics, but how individual words influence acoustic output remains unclear.
By Nityanand Mathur, Hamees Sayed, Wasim Madha, Apoorv Singh, Sameer Khurana, Akshat Mandloi, Sudarshan Kamath
arXiv:2510.22588v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Spoken dialogue models currently lack the ability for fine-grained speech style control, a critical capability for human-like interaction tha...
By Wenming Tu, Guanrou Yang, Ruiqi Yan, Wenxi Chen, Ziyang Ma, Yipeng Kang, Kai Yu, Xie Chen, Zilong Zheng
arXiv:2511. 16757v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Audio-language pretraining (ALP) holds promise for learning general-purpose audio representation, yet remains underexplored.
By Wei-Cheng Tseng, Xuanru Zhou, Mingyue Huo, Yiwen Shao, Hao Zhang, Dong Yu
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