MagpieTTS-LF: Inference-Time Long-Form Speech Generation Without Training on Long-Form data
Authors: Subhankar Ghosh, Jason Li, Paarth Neekhara, Shehzeen Hussain, Ryan Langman, Xuesong Yang, Roy Fejgin
Organizations: NVIDIA Corporation, USA
Abstract
Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve remarkable quality on short utterances but long-form speech generation shows prosodic drift, speaker inconsistencies and sentence boundary artifacts. Existing approaches either compress sequences, increase context length or naively concatenate independently synthesized chunks. We present an inference-time approach called MagpieTTS-LF that enables MagpieTTS to produce coherent long-form speech without model retraining. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) soft attention priors to guide monotonic alignment while preserving past and future context; (2) a stateful inference algorithm that maintains context across sentence chunks, ensuring prosodic continuity; (3) history-aware text encoding that uses past text for discourse-level prosodic planning. Experiments on long texts show significant improvements in long-range intelligibility, prosodic coherence, speaker consistency, and boundary naturalness compared to other baselines.
Long-form text-to-speech (TTS) enables multi-turn conversations with consistent prosody and higher quality voice cloning from longer reference audio. Recent open-weights autoregressive TTS models such as Qwen3-TTS and VoxCPM2 attain state-of-the-art word error rate (WER) and speaker similarity (SIM) on short-form prompts but significantly deteriorate when used with long-form prompts. We propose Localized Attention-Constrained Inference (LACI), an inference-only method to detect TTS errors in near real-time, roll back to the error onset and regenerate with temporary guardrails, adding negligible computational overhead. Using LACI, we improve worst-of-N WER across 10 RNG seeds for Qwen3-TTS-0.6B from 35.2% to 3.4% on prompts longer than 1500 words, even surpassing its short-form reliability of 5.4% on prompts with fewer than 500 words. To demonstrate the efficacy of LACI on voice cloning reliability, we propose a sliding-window version of the SIM metric that we call wSIM. wSIM exposes several novel failure patterns that are not captured by SIM. LACI improves worst-of-N wSIM from 0.01 to 0.47 on 120 seconds of reference audio while reducing the rate of catastrophic generations with WER above 30% from 26% to below 1%
Autoregressive (AR) text-to-speech (TTS) models generate discrete speech tokens sequentially, which makes inference slow and can degrade robustness by propagating local errors and hallucinations. This limitation stems from their left-to-right AR commitment: each token must be determined before future speech-token context is available. However, such ordering is not an inherent requirement for TTS, as the full input text is available before synthesis. In this paper, we introduce DELTA-TTS, a lightweight LoRA-based adaptation framework that converts a pretrained AR TTS model into a discrete diffusion language model (dLLM) for confidence-ordered speech-token decoding. To better capture the local structure of speech, DELTA-TTS incorporates a convolution module that injects local acoustic context, together with a 1/t-weighted training objective and a time-shifted inference schedule that defer low-confidence positions to later steps. Trained on only 585 hours of LibriTTS, DELTA-TTS achieves a 1.75% WER on Seed-TTS test-en, outperforming its AR backbone while generating tokens 3.3× faster. Further analysis shows that DELTA-TTS produces sharper text--speech alignment, increases overall decoding confidence, and mitigates hallucinations observed in AR generation.
Text-to-speech systems often face a trade-off between natural prosody and efficient inference: higher perceptual quality typically comes at increased computational cost and latency. We present TontaubeV1, a model that preserves natural prosody while enabling streaming from a single consumer GPU. Speech is encoded by the hierarchical DualCodec representation at 12.5 Hz, which separates a semantic stream from successive acoustic refinements. Our design assumes that prosodic structure is largely established when the semantic stream is generated, and allocates capacity accordingly: a Qwen3-1.7B-derived transformer predicts that stream and thereby the utterance duration, while three progressively smaller Qwen3-0.6B-derived transformers each add one acoustic refinement. Text is tokenized per character rather than by subword. Paired text and audio markers at shared positions support long-form generation with bounded context, and overlapping DualCodec reconstructions are mapped into the VibeVoice acoustic latent space and decoded causally, enabling streaming despite DualCodec's noncausal decoder. The model accepts up to one minute of reference audio for voice conditioning and is designed primarily for English and German, with additional multilingual support. The four predictors total 2.9B parameters; on a single RTX 5090 the streaming path reaches approximately 200 ms to first audio. In separate non-streaming measurements, the end-to-end real-time factor (RTF) is 0.08 for one input and the aggregate RTF is 0.02 across eight concurrent inputs. On our LLM-as-a-judge audiobook-reading benchmark, TontaubeV1 matches ElevenLabs Flash v2.5 and outperforms Fish Audio S2 Pro, the April 2026 Gradium API, and Cartesia Sonic 3 on prosody. The model weights are released on Hugging Face under the Tontaube Community Model License 1.0.