Overview

Voice cloning studies how to generate new speech that retains a person’s vocal identity while changing the words, language, or speaking style. Common approaches condition text-to-speech models on reference audio or speaker embeddings, using autoregressive token generation, diffusion or flow matching, and multilingual phonetic representations. Evaluation compares intelligibility, speaker similarity, prosody, and human judgments, with long-form consistency and preservation of accents and expressive traits remaining difficult. The field also faces an open tension between useful personalization and risks such as unauthorized imitation, unreliable clone attribution, and weak safeguards against misuse.

Latest papers

42 papers8 papers in the last four weeks, up 167% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Apr 30, 2026

JaiTTS: A Thai Voice Cloning Model

We present JaiTTS-v1.0, a state-of-the-art Thai voice cloning text-to-speech model built through continual training on a large Thai-centric speech corpus. The model architecture is adapted from VoxCPM, a tokenizer-free autoregressive TTS model. JaiTTS-v1.0 directly processes numerals and Thai-English code-switching, which is very common in realistic settings, without explicit text normalization. We test the models on short- and long-duration speech generation, which reflects many real-world use cases. JaiTTS-v1.0 achieves a state-of-the-art CER of 1.94%, surpassing the human ground truth of 1.98% for short-duration tasks while performing on par with human ground truth for long-duration tasks. In human judgment evaluations, our model wins 283 of 400 pairwise comparisons against commercial flagships, with only 58 losses. Our code and demo are available at https://github.com/JTS-AI-Team/JaiTTS .
Apr 28, 2026

One Voice, Many Tongues: Cross-Lingual Voice Cloning for Scientific Speech

Preserving a speaker's voice identity while generating speech in a different language remains a fundamental challenge in spoken language technology, particularly in specialized domains such as scientific communication. In this paper, we address this challenge through our system submission to the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2026), the Cross-Lingual Voice Cloning shared task. First, we evaluate several state-of-the-art voice cloning models for cross-lingual speech generation of scientific texts in Arabic, Chinese, and French. Then, we build voice cloning systems based on the OmniVoice foundation model. We employ data augmentation via multi-model ensemble distillation from the ACL 60/60 corpus. We investigate the effect of using this synthetic data for fine-tuning, demonstrating improvements in intelligibility (WER & CER) and speaker similarity (SIM), with gains varying across languages.
Apr 25, 2026

V.O.I.C.E (Voice, Ownership, Identity, Control, Expression): Risk Taxonomy of Synthetic Voice Generation From Empirical Data

As generative voice models are rapidly advancing in both capabilities and public utilization, the unconsented collection, reuse, and synthesis of voice data are introducing new classes of privacy, security and governance risk that are poorly captured by existing, largely uniform threat models. To fill the gap, we present V.O.I.C.E, a taxonomy of voice generation risk grounded in a multi-source threat modeling effort with 569 incidents from major AI incident database, FTC and Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3); 1067 direct incident reports from U.S. based participants across diverse groups (including voice actors, internet personalities, political personnel, and general public); and 2,221 Reddit discussions. Grounded in real-world data, our taxonomy explicitly models how risk emerges, interact with contextual factors such as degree of exposure, social visibility, and the availability of legal protections for various affected groups.
Apr 13, 2026

MimicLM: Zero-Shot Voice Imitation through Autoregressive Modeling of Pseudo-Parallel Speech Corpora

Voice imitation aims to transform source speech to match a reference speaker's timbre and speaking style while preserving linguistic content. A straightforward approach is to train on triplets of (source, reference, target), where source and target share the same content but target matches the reference's voice characteristics, yet such data is extremely scarce. Existing approaches either employ carefully designed disentanglement architectures to bypass this data scarcity or leverage external systems to synthesize pseudo-parallel training data. However, the former requires intricate model design, and the latter faces a quality ceiling when synthetic speech is used as training targets. To address these limitations, we propose MimicLM, which takes a novel approach by using synthetic speech as training sources while retaining real recordings as targets. This design enables the model to learn directly from real speech distributions, breaking the synthetic quality ceiling. Building on this data construction approach, we incorporate interleaved text-audio modeling to guide the generation of content-accurate speech and apply post-training with preference alignment to mitigate the inherent distributional mismatch when training on synthetic data. Experiments demonstrate that MimicLM achieves superior voice imitation quality with a simple yet effective architecture, significantly outperforming existing methods in naturalness while maintaining competitive similarity scores across speaker identity, accent, and emotion dimensions.
Apr 10, 2026

Bridging the Stability-Expressivity Gap: Synthetic Data Scaling and Preference Alignment for Low-Resource Spoken Language Models

Spoken Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for speech synthesis by bypassing explicit grapheme-to-phoneme pipelines. However, their effectiveness in low-resource languages remains fundamentally limited by the scarcity of transcribed speech. In practice, synthetic data has become the primary strategy for scaling SLMs in such settings, providing reliable phonetic supervision when real data is insufficient. In this work, we show that this reliance introduces a fundamental trade-off, which we term the Stability-Expressivity Gap: while synthetic data improves phonetic accuracy, it progressively suppresses prosodic variability, ultimately leading to a collapse of expressivity (Synthetic Erosion). To bridge this gap, we propose two self-alignment frameworks. Disentanglement-Guided Self-Alignment (DGSA) recovers expressivity for complex languages by exploiting prosody-timbre separation. For regimes where authentic references are exceptionally limited, Temperature-Driven Self-Critique (TDSC) stabilizes generation through automated exploration and filtering. Our approach outperforms strong commercial systems, including ElevenLabs and Gemini Pro, and enables the first zero-shot voice cloning capability for Lao.
Apr 2, 2026

Acoustic and perceptual differences between standard and accented speech and their voice clones

Voice cloning is often evaluated in terms of overall quality, but less is known about accent preservation and its perceptual consequences. We compare standard and heavily accented Mandarin speech and their voice clones using a combined computational and perceptual design. Embedding-based analyses showed larger original-clone distances for accented speakers in several speaker-discriminative embedding spaces, but this difference disappeared after adjusting for each speaker's within-original baseline variability. In the perception study, clones are rated as more similar to their originals for standard than for accented speakers, and intelligibility increases from original to clone, with a larger gain for accented speech. These results show that accent variation can shape perceived identity match and intelligibility in voice cloning even when it is not observed in baseline-adjusted speaker-embedding distance, and they motivate treating accent preservation as an explicit component of speaker identity preservation, rather than assuming that it is fully captured by off-the-shelf speaker-discriminative embeddings.
Mar 26, 2026

Voxtral TTS

We introduce Voxtral TTS, an expressive multilingual text-to-speech model that generates natural speech from as little as 3 seconds of reference audio. Voxtral TTS adopts a hybrid architecture that combines auto-regressive generation of semantic speech tokens with flow-matching for acoustic tokens. These tokens are encoded and decoded with Voxtral Codec, a speech tokenizer trained from scratch with a hybrid VQ-FSQ quantization scheme. In human evaluations conducted by native speakers, Voxtral TTS is preferred for multilingual voice cloning due to its naturalness and expressivity, achieving a 68.4% win rate over ElevenLabs Flash v2.5. We release the model weights under a CC BY-NC license.
Mar 20, 2026

Audio Avatar Fingerprinting: An Approach for Authorized Use of Voice Cloning in the Era of Synthetic Audio

With the advancements in AI speech synthesis, it is easier than ever before to generate realistic audio in a target voice. One only needs a few seconds of reference audio from the target, quite literally putting words in the target person's mouth. This imposes a new set of forensics-related challenges on speech-based authentication systems, videoconferencing, and audio-visual broadcasting platforms, where we want to detect synthetic speech. At the same time, leveraging AI speech synthesis can enhance the different modes of communication through features such as low-bandwidth communication and audio enhancements - leading to ever-increasing legitimate use-cases of synthetic audio. In this case, we want to verify if the synthesized voice is actually spoken by the user. This will require a mechanism to verify whether a given synthetic audio is driven by an authorized identity, or not. We term this task audio avatar fingerprinting. As a step towards audio forensics in these new and emerging situations, we analyze and extend an off-the-shelf speaker verification model developed outside of forensics context for the task of fake speech detection and audio avatar fingerprinting, the first experimentation of its kind. Furthermore, we observe that no existing dataset allows for the novel task of verifying the authorized use of synthetic audio - a limitation which we address by introducing a new speech forensics dataset for this novel task.
Mar 17, 2026

CAST-TTS: A Simple Cross-Attention Framework for Unified Timbre Control in TTS

Current Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems typically use separate models for speech-prompted and text-prompted timbre control. While unifying both control signals into a single model is desirable, the challenge of cross-modal alignment often results in overly complex architectures and training objective. To address this challenge, we propose CAST-TTS, a simple yet effective framework for unified timbre control. Features are extracted from speech prompts and text prompts using pre-trained encoders. The multi-stage training strategy efficiently aligns the speech and projected text representations within a shared embedding space. A single cross-attention mechanism then allows the model to use either of these representations to control the timbre. Extensive experiments validate that the unified cross-attention mechanism is critical for achieving high-quality synthesis. CAST-TTS achieves performance comparable to specialized single-input models while operating within a unified architecture. The demo page can be accessed at https://HiRookie9.github.io/CAST-TTS-Page.
Mar 10, 2026

ID-LoRA: Identity-Driven Audio-Video Personalization with In-Context LoRA

Existing video personalization methods preserve visual likeness but treat video and audio separately. Without access to the visual scene, audio models cannot synchronize sounds with on-screen actions; and because classical voice-cloning models condition only on a reference recording, a text prompt cannot redirect speaking style or acoustic environment. We propose ID-LoRA (Identity-Driven In-Context LoRA), which jointly generates a subject's appearance and voice in a single model, letting a text prompt, a reference image, and a short audio clip govern both modalities together. ID-LoRA adapts the LTX-2 joint audio-video diffusion backbone via parameter-efficient In-Context LoRA and, to our knowledge, is the first method to personalize visual appearance and voice in a single generative pass. Two challenges arise. Reference and generation tokens share the same positional-encoding space, making them hard to distinguish; we address this with negative temporal positions, placing reference tokens in a disjoint RoPE region while preserving their internal temporal structure. Speaker characteristics also tend to be diluted during denoising; we introduce identity guidance, a classifier-free guidance variant that amplifies speaker-specific features by contrasting predictions with and without the reference signal. In human preference studies, ID-LoRA is preferred over Kling 2.6 Pro by 73% of annotators for voice similarity and 65% for speaking style. On cross-environment settings, speaker similarity improves by 24% over Kling, with the gap widening as conditions diverge. A preliminary user study further suggests that joint generation provides a useful inductive bias for physically grounded sound synthesis. ID-LoRA achieves these results with only ~3K training pairs on a single GPU. Code, models, and data will be released.
Mar 8, 2026

Speech Generation Speaker Poisoning: Capability Erasure in Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech

Recent zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems can clone previously unseen voices from only a few seconds of audio. We formulate Speech Generation Speaker Poisoning (SGSP), a task that seeks to prevent a model from synthesizing targeted speaker identities while maintaining performance on all other speakers. Unlike conventional machine unlearning, removing training examples is insufficient because modern zero-shot TTS systems can reconstruct identities through learned speaker representations and strong generalization capabilities. We evaluate both inference-time filtering and parameter-modification approaches across settings involving 1, 15, and 100 forget speakers, focusing primarily on speakers seen during training, which we show are harder to suppress than unseen speakers. To characterize the trade-off between utility and privacy, we introduce an evaluation framework based on AUC analysis and a proposed metric, Forget Set Similarity (FSSIM). Our results demonstrate effective speaker suppression for up to 15 forget speakers while revealing that worst-case identity leakage (Max-FSSIM) remains unresolved at multi-speaker scale - establishing this as an open challenge for future work. Together, our work establishes targeted speaker poisoning as a task for zero-shot TTS and, using StyleTTS2 as an initial testbed, provides methods and evaluation protocols for future research, with code and model weights.
Jan 31, 2026

RVCBench: Benchmarking the Robustness of Voice Cloning Across Modern Audio Generation Models

Modern Voice Cloning (VC) can synthesize speech that closely matches a target speaker from only seconds of reference audio, enabling applications such as personalized speech interfaces and dubbing. In practical deployments, modern audio generation models inevitably encounter noisy reference audios, imperfect text prompts, multilingual and long-form generation settings, downstream post-processing, and adversarial perturbations, all of which can significantly hurt robustness. Despite rapid progress in VC driven by autoregressive codec-token language models and diffusion-based models, robustness under realistic deployment shifts remains underexplored. This paper introduces RVCBench, a comprehensive dataset and benchmark that evaluates Robustness in Voice Clone. RVCBench contributes a large-scale, task-aligned robustness dataset that instantiates realistic deployment shifts through controlled text-audio pairing, multilingual and long-form scenarios, expressive prompts, post-processing conditions, and passive or proactive audio perturbations. Covering 18 robustness evaluations, 204 unique speakers, and 14,370 utterance-level evaluation items, RVCBench enables unified evaluation of input sensitivity, generation stability, output resilience, and perturbation robustness. We evaluate 18 representative modern open-source VC models and reveal systematic vulnerabilities in content consistency, speaker similarity, long-form stability, post-processing resilience, adversarial robustness, and detector-facing separability. We open-source the toolkit and dataset to support reproducible evaluation and future research.