UR-BERT: Scaling Text Encoders for Massively Multilingual TTS Through Universal Romanization and Speech Token Prediction

arXiv:2606.11681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose UR-BERT, a Romanized transcription-based text-to-speech (TTS) encoder for massively multilingual TTS systems. Conventional grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P)-based approaches are limited to around 100 languages due to the availability of reliable G2P resources. In contrast, UR-BERT scales to 495 languages by unifying diverse writing systems into a shared Romanization representation. To further enhance phonetic fidelity and text-speech alignment, we introduce a speech token prediction objective during training, which encourages the encoder to le

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

This is a curated wire item. The Continuum Brief does not republish full third-party articles; this entry links to the original source.