Breaking the Barriers of Text-Hungry and Audio-Deficient AI

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel textless, audio-to-audio AI framework that leverages new architectures and a multiscale audio-semantic transform to generate high-fidelity speech, expanding language technology access to underserved, audio-literate populations.

Contribution

It presents the first fully audio-based translation architectures and a multiscale audio-semantic transform, enabling scalable, textless speech generation across diverse languages.

Findings

High-fidelity speech generation without textual supervision

Effective processing of unwritten or low-resource languages

Scalable system learning directly from raw audio

Abstract

While global linguistic diversity spans more than 7164 recognized languages, the current dominant architecture of machine intelligence remains fundamentally biased toward written text. This bias excludes over 700 million people particularly in rural and remote regions who are audio-literate. In this work, we introduce a fully textless, audio-to-audio machine intelligence framework designed to serve this underserved population, and all the people who prefer audio-efficiency. Our contributions include novel Audio-to-Audio translation architectures that bypass text entirely, including spectrogram-, scalogram-, wavelet-, and unit-based models. Central to our approach is the Multiscale Audio-Semantic Transform (MAST), a representation that encodes tonal, prosodic, speaker, and expressive features. We further integrate MAST into a fractional diffusion of mean-field-type framework powered by fractional Brownian motion. It enables the generation of high-fidelity, semantically consistent speech without reliance on textual supervision. The result is a robust and scalable system capable of learning directly from raw audio, even in languages that are unwritten or rarely digitized. This work represents a fundamental shift toward audio-native machine intelligence systems, expanding access to language technologies for communities historically left out of the current machine intelligence ecosystem.