Vox-Evaluator: Enhancing Stability and Fidelity for Zero-shot TTS with A Multi-Level Evaluator

TL;DR

Vox-Evaluator is a multi-level assessment tool that improves zero-shot TTS stability and fidelity by identifying errors, guiding corrections, and aligning preferences, leading to more natural and accurate speech synthesis.

Contribution

This paper introduces Vox-Evaluator, a novel multi-level evaluator that detects errors, guides speech correction, and improves preference alignment in zero-shot TTS systems.

Findings

Vox-Evaluator effectively identifies erroneous speech segments.

The correction mechanism improves speech stability and quality.

Preference alignment reduces synthesis errors.

Abstract

Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS), driven by language models, diffusion models and masked generation, have achieved impressive naturalness in speech synthesis. Nevertheless, stability and fidelity remain key challenges, manifesting as mispronunciations, audible noise, and quality degradation. To address these issues, we introduce Vox-Evaluator, a multi-level evaluator designed to guide the correction of erroneous speech segments and preference alignment for TTS systems. It is capable of identifying the temporal boundaries of erroneous segments and providing a holistic quality assessment of the generated speech. Specifically, to refine erroneous segments and enhance the robustness of the zero-shot TTS model, we propose to automatically identify acoustic errors with the evaluator, mask the erroneous segments, and finally regenerate speech conditioning on the correct portions. In addition, the fine-gained information obtained from Vox-Evaluator can guide the preference alignment for TTS model, thereby reducing the bad cases in speech synthesis. Due to the lack of suitable training datasets for the Vox-Evaluator, we also constructed a synthesized text-speech dataset annotated with fine-grained pronunciation errors or audio quality issues. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Vox-Evaluator in enhancing the stability and fidelity of TTS systems through the speech correction mechanism and preference optimization. The demos are shown.