cs.CLSep 1, 2026

Ready to Speak: Aligning LLMs for TTS-Friendly Text Generation

Authors: Thibaut Thonet, Jos Rozen, Laurent Besacier

Organizations: NAVER LABS Europe

Abstract

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are primarily optimized for written text, often producing outputs that are grammatically correct and helpful yet poorly suited for spoken delivery via Text-to-Speech (TTS). In this work, we study how to make LLMs natively generate TTS-friendly text, which we frame as a preference alignment problem: instead of relying on downstream rewriting modules, we directly align LLMs to generate text optimized for spoken delivery. We introduce two preference datasets spanning different target domains, CORA and Recipe, which contain paired TTS-friendly and TTS-unfriendly responses. We further propose an evaluation suite combining a pattern-based heuristic metric, a TTS→\toASR evaluation pipeline, and a MUSHRA listening study with human judges. Our experiments compare the recently proposed Feature-aware Sampling and Tuning (FaST) framework -- leveraging interpretable features instead of a black-box reward model -- against an array of alignment baselines on the TTS-friendly generation task. Notably, we found that FaST achieves the best overall tradeoff between TTS-friendliness and helpfulness across various settings. We also identified a strong correlation between our different metrics, highlighting the ability to reliably assess TTS-friendliness via an efficient heuristic.

Explore similar work

CardsList
Feb 23, 2026eess.AS

CTC-TTS: LLM-based dual-streaming text-to-speech with CTC alignment

Large-language-model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems can generate natural speech, but most are not designed for low-latency dual-streaming synthesis. High-quality dual-streaming TTS depends on accurate text--speech alignment and well-designed training sequences that balance synthesis quality and latency. Prior work often relies on GMM-HMM based forced-alignment toolkits (e.g., MFA), which are pipeline-heavy and less flexible than neural aligners; fixed-ratio interleaving of text and speech tokens struggles to capture text--speech alignment regularities. We propose CTC-TTS, which replaces MFA with a CTC based aligner and introduces a bi-word based interleaving strategy. Two variants are designed: CTC-TTS-L (token concatenation along the sequence length) for higher quality and CTC-TTS-F (embedding stacking along the feature dimension) for lower latency. Experiments show that CTC-TTS outperforms fixed-ratio interleaving and MFA-based baselines on streaming synthesis and zero-shot tasks.
Hanwen Liu, Saierdaer Yusuyin, Hao Huang +1
F5-Tts
AskPDF
Aug 10, 2026cs.SD

Beyond Naturalness: Probing Automated Text-To-Speech Evaluators on Linguistically Grounded Dimensions

Automated Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation methods (Mean Opinion Score (MOS) predictors and Audio Large Language Models (Audio-LLM) judges) are expected to reflect human perception, yet it is unclear how well they capture the distinct aspects of speech that listeners actually perceive. We deconstruct "naturalness" into a linguistically grounded annotation schema spanning 10 distinct perceptual dimensions, and use it to construct the first dimension-level meta-evaluation benchmark for TTS, comprising 860 utterances annotated by trained linguist raters. Results from benchmarking four MOS predictors and four Audio-LLM judges reveal that MOS predictors collapse onto acoustic signal quality, while Audio-LLM judges show selective, prompt-dependent detection that does not generalise across all dimensions. Neither class reliably captures a breadth of linguistically structured speech errors. Our dataset, annotation schema, and evaluation code are publicly released to support more targeted and interpretable TTS evaluation.
Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Simon Rosen, Jash Shah +6
Zero-Shot Text-To-SpeechLarge Audio Language ModelsLinguisticsMean Opinion Scores
AskPDF
Jul 5, 2026eess.AS

DELTA-TTS: Adapting Autoregressive Model into Diffusion Language Model for Text-to-Speech

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/t1/t-weighted training objective and a time-shifted inference schedule that defer low-confidence positions to later steps. Trained on only 585585 hours of LibriTTS, DELTA-TTS achieves a 1.75%\textbf{1.75}\% WER on Seed-TTS test-en, outperforming its AR backbone while generating tokens 3.3×\textbf{3.3}\times faster. Further analysis shows that DELTA-TTS produces sharper text--speech alignment, increases overall decoding confidence, and mitigates hallucinations observed in AR generation.
Junwon Moon, Seungbeom Kim, Yejin Lee +4
Zero-Shot Text-To-SpeechAutoregressive Language ModelsDiffusion Language ModelsAutoregressive GenerationAutoregressive ModelLatent Reasoning Tokens
AskPDF