CtrlSpeech: Coarse-to-Fine Control for Expressive Speech Synthesis

Zhisheng Zheng; Xiaohang Sun; Zhu Liu; Caren Chen; Rohith Kumar; Manoj Aggarwal; Gerard Medioni; David Harwath

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arXiv · 2608.08362

CtrlSpeech: Coarse-to-Fine Control for Expressive Speech Synthesis

Zhisheng Zheng·Xiaohang Sun·Zhu Liu·Caren Chen·Rohith Kumar·Manoj Aggarwal·Gerard Medioni·David Harwath

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Abstract

Recent Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems have achieved strong naturalness and zero-shot voice cloning performance, but fine-grained control of expressive speech at the word or phoneme level remains challenging. We propose CtrlSpeech, a controllable, expressive TTS framework with coarse-to-fine control. Built on the DiTAR architecture, CtrlSpeech combines global speaker conditioning with phone-aligned pitch, loudness, and duration signals, enabling localized prosodic control while preserving the target speaker's timbre. This design allows users to adjust expressive attributes at a fine temporal granularity, making speech refinement more flexible and controllable. Experimental results show that CtrlSpeech achieves competitive zero-shot TTS performance and improves controllability over expressive attributes, demonstrating its effectiveness for flexible and practical expressive speech synthesis.

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Zhisheng Zheng, Xiaohang Sun, Zhu Liu, Caren Chen, Rohith Kumar, Manoj Aggarwal, Gerard Medioni, David Harwath. 2026-08-08. CtrlSpeech: Coarse-to-Fine Control for Expressive Speech Synthesis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08362

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