Speech Technology

Conversational AI Reading Group (led by MousaviPooneh) resumes tomorrow! https://poonehmousavi.github.io/rg [Sep 18th, 2025] Discrete Audio Tokens: More Than a Survey! Presenter:Pooneh Mousavi Mila - Concordia https://poonehmousavi.github.io/dates-website/

https://github.com/OpenBMB/VoxCPM VoxCPM is a novel tokenizer-free Text-to-Speech (TTS) system that redefines realism in speech synthesis. By modeling speech in a continuous space, it overcomes the limitations of discrete tokenization and enables two flagship capabilities: context-aware speech generation and true-to-life zero-shot voice cloning. Unlike mainstream approaches that convert speech to discrete tokens, VoxCPM uses an end-to-end diffusion autoregressive architecture that directly generates continuous speech representations from text. Built on MiniCPM-4 backbone, it achieves implicit semantic-acoustic decoupling through hierachical language modeling and FSQ constraints, greatly enhancing both expressiveness and generation stability.

Nice interview with some details on 11labs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whVdDLtkiKs "Narration has platoed" they say

From DeepMind https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2509.05256 Recomposer: Event-roll-guided generative audio editing Daniel P. W. Ellis, Eduardo Fonseca, Ron J. Weiss, Kevin Wilson, Scott Wisdom, Hakan Erdogan, John R. Hershey, Aren Jansen, R. Channing Moore, Manoj Plakal Editing complex real-world sound scenes is difficult because individual sound sources overlap in time. Generative models can fill-in missing or corrupted details based on their strong prior understanding of the data domain. We present a system for editing individual sound events within complex scenes able to delete, insert, and enhance individual sound events based on textual edit descriptions (e.g., ``enhance Door'') and a graphical representation of the event timing derived from an ``event roll'' transcription. We present an encoder-decoder transformer working on SoundStream representations, trained on synthetic (input, desired output) audio example pairs formed by adding isolated sound events to dense, real-world backgrounds. Evaluation reveals the importance of each part of the edit descriptions -- action, class, timing. Our work demonstrates ``recomposition'' is an important and practical application.

https://github.com/Tobertz-max/DiFlow-TTS DiFlow-TTS delivers low-latency, zero-shot text-to-speech through discrete flow matching and factorized speech tokens. It combines a compact token representation with a flow-based sampler to produce natural speech quickly, even for unseen speakers and languages

Meet Chatterbox Multilingual! 🔥 Production grade. Open source. Voice Cloning in 23 languages. Emotion and intensity control. PerTh watermarking on by default. MIT license. Free forever. You asked for this, we delivered. Chatterbox Multilingual adds zero-shot voice cloning in 23 languages from Arabic and Hindi to Chinese and Swahili. https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox Arabic (ar) • Danish (da) • German (de) • Greek (el) • English (en) • Spanish (es) • Finnish (fi) • French (fr) • Hebrew (he) • Hindi (hi) • Italian (it) • Japanese (ja) • Korean (ko) • Malay (ms) • Dutch (nl) • Norwegian (no) • Polish (pl) • Portuguese (pt) • Russian (ru) • Swedish (sv) • Swahili (sw) • Turkish (tr) • Chinese (zh)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21619 IndexTTS2: A Breakthrough in Emotionally Expressive and Duration-Controlled Auto-Regressive Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Siyi Zhou, Yiquan Zhou, Yi He, Xun Zhou, Jinchao Wang, Wei Deng, Jingchen Shu Existing autoregressive large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models have advantages in speech naturalness, but their token-by-token generation mechanism makes it difficult to precisely control the duration of synthesized speech. This becomes a significant limitation in applications requiring strict audio-visual synchronization, such as video dubbing. This paper introduces IndexTTS2, which proposes a novel, general, and autoregressive model-friendly method for speech duration control. The method supports two generation modes: one explicitly specifies the number of generated tokens to precisely control speech duration; the other freely generates speech in an autoregressive manner without specifying the number of tokens, while faithfully reproducing the prosodic features of the input prompt. Furthermore, IndexTTS2 achieves disentanglement between emotional expression and speaker identity, enabling independent control over timbre and emotion. In the zero-shot setting, the model can accurately reconstruct the target timbre (from the timbre prompt) while perfectly reproducing the specified emotional tone (from the style prompt). To enhance speech clarity in highly emotional expressions, we incorporate GPT latent representations and design a novel three-stage training paradigm to improve the stability of the generated speech. Additionally, to lower the barrier for emotional control, we designed a soft instruction mechanism based on text descriptions by fine-tuning Qwen3, effectively guiding the generation of speech with the desired emotional orientation. Finally, experimental results on multiple datasets show that IndexTTS2 outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS models in terms of word error rate, speaker similarity, and emotional fidelity. Audio samples are available at: this https URL

Everyone talks about smart VAD these days. Backchannel actions are also important https://github.com/Linyx1125/MM-F2F

An guy proposed a model for hf asr leaderboard. Average WER 3.1% compared to previous best 6.1% https://github.com/huggingface/open_asr_leaderboard/pull/92#issuecomment-3239312224 WER on librispeech test-clean 0.71, quite a bold claim This suggests the importance of closed source tests.

This is nice, crepe is extremely slow https://github.com/lars76/swift-f0

CoLMbo is a Speaker Language Model (SLM) designed to go beyond traditional speaker recognition. While most systems stop at identifying “who” the speaker is, CoLMbo answers “what is this speaker like?” by generating context-rich, descriptive captions from speaker embeddings including gender, age, personality, and dialectю https://github.com/massabaali7/CoLMbo

Another TTS thing, claims are very good https://github.com/HeCheng0625/Diffusion-Speech-Tokenizer

Microsoft released TTS model, should be good https://github.com/microsoft/VibeVoice

For us flow matching guys https://github.com/primepake/F5-TTS-meanflow https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13447 Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling Zhengyang Geng, Mingyang Deng, Xingjian Bai, J. Zico Kolter, Kaiming He We propose a principled and effective framework for one-step generative modeling. We introduce the notion of average velocity to characterize flow fields, in contrast to instantaneous velocity modeled by Flow Matching methods. A well-defined identity between average and instantaneous velocities is derived and used to guide neural network training. Our method, termed the MeanFlow model, is self-contained and requires no pre-training, distillation, or curriculum learning. MeanFlow demonstrates strong empirical performance: it achieves an FID of 3.43 with a single function evaluation (1-NFE) on ImageNet 256x256 trained from scratch, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art one-step diffusion/flow models. Our study substantially narrows the gap between one-step diffusion/flow models and their multi-step predecessors, and we hope it will motivate future research to revisit the foundations of these powerful models.

While some things are questionable, return back to phonemes is nice https://github.com/tabahi/contexless-phonemes-CUPE https://github.com/tabahi/bournemouth-forced-aligner

Diffusion in ASR too. No code yet, hopefully will be there soon. Nice benchmarks, Gemini tops on speech (confirmed by our tests too). https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18452 DIFFA: Large Language Diffusion Models Can Listen and Understand Jiaming Zhou, Hongjie Chen, Shiwan Zhao, Jian Kang, Jie Li, Enzhi Wang, Yujie Guo, Haoqin Sun, Hui Wang, Aobo Kong, Yong Qin, Xuelong Li Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across textual and multimodal domains. In parallel, diffusion-based language models have emerged as a promising alternative to the autoregressive paradigm, offering improved controllability, bidirectional context modeling, and robust generation. However, their application to the audio modality remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce \textbf{DIFFA}, the first diffusion-based large audio-language model designed to perform spoken language understanding. DIFFA integrates a frozen diffusion language model with a lightweight dual-adapter architecture that bridges speech understanding and natural language reasoning. We employ a two-stage training pipeline: first, aligning semantic representations via an ASR objective; then, learning instruction-following abilities through synthetic audio-caption pairs automatically generated by prompting LLMs. Despite being trained on only 960 hours of ASR and 127 hours of synthetic instruction data, DIFFA demonstrates competitive performance on major benchmarks, including MMSU, MMAU, and VoiceBench, outperforming several autoregressive open-source baselines. Our results reveal the potential of diffusion-based language models for efficient and scalable audio understanding, opening a new direction for speech-driven AI. Our code will be available at this https URL.

Comprehensive google survey on lightweight keyword spotting https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/kws_streaming#streamable-and-non-streamable-models This model is recommended on our Reddit. Just 10k params: https://github.com/Qualcomm-AI-research/bcresnet From our reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/speechtech/comments/1mmrc3b/comment/n93hm1h/

Interspeech 2025 starts tomorrow, yet to read the papers. Interesting that some guys leave speech, mesolitica developer for example said he released the last model https://x.com/huseinzol05/status/1956638778367578265 Just learned Alan Black retired to Alaska some time ago: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/ Not many familiar names in IS papers too, so many people gone.

Well, another recent CoT repo: https://github.com/FunAudioLLM/ThinkSound