Bridging What the Model Thinks and How It Speaks: Expressive Speech Generation via Self-Aware Intent-Realization Alignment
arXiv:2604.11424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Speech Language Models (SLMs) exhibit strong semantic understanding, yet often fail to translate this capacity into expressive acoustic realization, producing speech with flattened prosody and misaligned emotion. We identify this mismatch as the semantic understanding-acoustic realization gap. Existing approaches typically rely on externally specified proxies, such as emotion labels or style prompts, which require annotations and struggle to capture dynamically evolving expressive intent throughout dialogue. To overcome these limitations, we
Advances in Speech Language Models (SLMs) are pushing the boundaries of speech generation, revealing current limitations in expressive acoustic realization. This push for more natural and nuanced AI-generated speech is a natural progression in AI development as foundational models mature.
Improving expressive speech generation addresses a critical gap in human-computer interaction, making AI systems more intuitive and reducing the 'uncanny valley' effect. This directly impacts the adoption and utility of AI in customer service, education, entertainment, and agentic systems.
The ability of SLMs to bridge the gap between semantic understanding and expressive acoustic output will lead to more naturally sounding AI voices that convey nuanced intent. This moves beyond simple text-to-speech to emotionally and contextually aware spoken output.
- · AI developers
- · Customer service platforms
- · Content creators
- · Virtual assistants
- · Monotone text-to-speech providers
- · Companies relying on unexpressive AI voice experiences
AI-generated speech will sound more human-like and convey emotion more effectively.
Increased user comfort and trust in AI systems due to more natural and empathetic interactions.
Enhanced realism in AI-driven virtual characters and agents, blurring the lines between human and synthetic communication in various applications.
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