arXiv AI
Sep 4

Building and Evaluating Fixed-Voice Thai TTS from Synthetic Speech

The paper presents a method for creating a compact fixed‑voice Thai text‑to‑speech system by training a student model on synthetic speech generated from a large voice‑cloning teacher. By using only a short 15‑second voice reference and carefully filtering synthetic data, the authors build an 82‑million‑parameter model, Wayu‑Paxa‑TTS‑Edge, that runs on device without reference audio. The system achieves strong performance—68.2 % challenge‑set keyword accuracy, 91.4 % pause precision, and low character error rates—while outperforming its teacher and approaching the quality of a larger Gemini 3.1 model.

By Kunat Pipatanakul, Potsawee Manakul, Warit Sirichotedumrong, Sittipong Sripaisarnmongkol, Pakorn Nathong, Phatrasek Jirabovonvisut
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Look Less, Hear Better: Jointly Rewarded GRPO for Streaming ASR

The paper introduces AWED, a word‑level emission‑delay metric, and demonstrates that post‑training a delayed‑streaming model with a joint reward (GRPO) improves both accuracy and latency. Using a single operating point (τ=6 frames), the method outperforms both its supervised baseline and the Voxtral Realtime backbone across all lookahead budgets, reducing WER by up to 30.8% at 80 ms delay and lowering median AWED from 1.17 s to 1.04 s.

By Xiuwen Zheng
arXiv AI
Sep 10

X2Streaming-ASR: wait when uncertain, emit when ready for streaming ASR

X2Streaming-ASR introduces a method for streaming automatic speech recognition that separates the decision of when to commit a transcript from what to commit. The approach uses a three‑stage training process: first establishing streaming capability, then warm‑starting a commit policy with automatically probed trajectories, and finally refining the policy with character‑level, segment‑assigned group‑relative rewards for accuracy and latency. On AISHELL‑1/2/3 and WenetSpeech datasets, the system achieves mean character‑level commit latencies of 27–84 ms, far lower than baseline systems, while also attaining the best streaming character error rates on AISHELL‑1 and AISHELL‑3.

By Zhiwei Lin, Kaiqi Fu, Rime Wen, Zehan Liu, Shawn Qin, Roy Gan, Hao Wang, Qian Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Enabling Streaming User Transcription in Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech Models

The paper introduces a lightweight ASR head that can be added to full‑duplex speech‑to‑speech models, enabling real‑time user transcription without major architectural changes. The method adds only a few parameters and preserves full‑duplex conversational features such as turn‑taking and barge‑in. Experiments show a streaming WER of 10.21% within the duplex framework and 7.73% when trained as a standalone ASR model, matching state‑of‑the‑art performance.

By Ke Hu, Nourchene Ferchichi, Edresson Casanova, Ankita Pasad, Elena Rastorgueva, Chen Chen, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Piotr Zelasko, Yifan Peng, Hainan Xu, Zhehuai Chen, Boris Ginsburg