The field of speech processing is moving towards more accurate and human-like speech quality assessment and generation. Recent developments have focused on improving the evaluation of speech quality, with an emphasis on reflecting human perception. Additionally, there has been a push towards more fine-grained control over speech emotion and the integration of paralinguistic vocalizations into speech recognition and synthesis systems. Noteworthy papers in this area include:
- EmoSteer-TTS, which achieves fine-grained speech emotion control without requiring extensive training data.
- NVSpeech, which presents a scalable pipeline for recognizing and synthesizing paralinguistic vocalizations.
- The State Of TTS, which introduces a metric to directly measure how often machine-generated speech is mistaken for human. These advancements have the potential to significantly improve the naturalness and expressiveness of speech generation systems, and to enable more effective evaluation and comparison of these systems.