The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
Vagdhenu is a Sanskrit shloka‑to‑chant text‑to‑speech system that preserves meter (vrutta) and phonological nuances. It builds on an off‑the‑shelf flow‑matching backbone and a large‑scale neural vocoder, adding a Kannada‑based frontend to avoid schwa deletion, a phonology‑aware frontend handling visarga sandhi and sibilant distinctions, and a vrutta‑aware reference selection mechanism. The authors report that a text‑side prosody conditioner is ineffective in their architecture, while reference clips and voice‑steering retraining provide the necessary prosody control, and they demonstrate the system’s performance on a 32‑chapter video corpus and an audio app covering 18,000 verses. whyItMatters":"The system delivers high‑fidelity, meter‑aware Sanskrit chanting, enabling large‑scale deployment of authentic recitations for educational and cultural preservation purposes."
PARSA‑Bench is the first dedicated benchmark for evaluating large audio‑language models on Persian, addressing unique challenges such as classical poetry, traditional music, and code‑switching. It comprises 16 tasks—10 of which are new—covering speech understanding, paralinguistic analysis, and culturally grounded audio reasoning. Across most tasks, text‑only baselines outperform audio‑based models, indicating that audio understanding remains the main limitation, except for Persian poetry where prosody provides additional information that audio beats text.
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:2610.14826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent alignment-free Text-to-Speech (TTS) models achieve high synthesis quality by removing explicit alignment modules and simplifying training. How...
While large language model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have achieved high-quality speech synthesis, most existing systems focus on English and Chinese. Japanese, however, remains under-explored, and its unique linguistic challenges, such as widespread context-dependent kanji polyphony, have yet to be adequately tackled.
arXiv:2605. 13087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning multilingual ASR models like Whisper for low-resource languages often improves read speech but degrades spontaneous audio performance.