Is Natural Always Appropriate? Investigating Naturalness and Appropriateness Across Different Domains for TTS Evaluation

arXiv:2606.31729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-speech (TTS) evaluation is an open challenge. While the primary target was "naturalness," recent fidelity gains shifted focus toward "appropriateness" and whether speech is correct for its context. In this work, we examine how perception changes when the expected downstream use varies. We measure the appropriateness and human-likeness of five SOTA TTS systems across five domains: AI assistant, reader, actor, animated character, and spontaneous speaker. Results show appropriateness varies across domains independently of naturalness. Whil

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

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