BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs
Yue Wang Soochow University, China, Ruotian Ma Tencent, Xingyu Chen Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zhengliang Shi, Morunliu Yang, Wanshun Chen, Huang Liu, Jiadi Yao Tencent 等 17 位作者
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping multimodel models, with speech synthesis being a prominent application. However, existing approaches often underutilize the linguistic intelligence of these models, typically failing to leverage their powerful instruction-following capabilities. This limitation hinders the model’s ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS). To address this, we propose a new paradigm inspired by operationalism that decouples instruction understanding from speech generation. We introduce BatonVoice, a framework where an LLM acts as a conductor, understanding user instructions and generating a textual plan – explicit vocal features (e.g., pitch, energy). A separate TTS model, the orchestra, then generates the speech from these features. To realize this component, we develop BatonTTS, a TTS model trained specifically for this task. Our experiments demonstrate that BatonVoice achieves strong performance in controllable and emotional speech synthesis, outperforming strong open- and closed-source baselines. Notably, our approach enables remarkable zero-shot cross-lingual generalization, accurately applying feature control abilities to languages unseen during post-training. This demonstrates that objectifying speech into textual vocal features can more effectively unlock the linguistic intelligence of LLMs.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表