Audio and speech
Audio models handle time-varying signals: speech, music, environmental sound, and generated voice. The same generative and representation ideas appear, but evaluation is tied to intelligibility, timing, speaker identity, and listening quality.
Main task families
| Task | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| ASR | speech audio | transcript |
| TTS | text | speech waveform |
| Speech translation | speech in one language | text or speech in another |
| Voice conversion | source voice and target style | transformed speech |
| Music generation | prompt, melody, or audio | music clip |
| Audio understanding | sound clip | labels, events, captions |
Model ingredients
- Acoustic features or learned audio tokens.
- Sequence models for long temporal structure.
- Diffusion, autoregressive, or codec-based generators.
- Speaker embeddings for voice identity.
- Alignment mechanisms for text, phonemes, and timing.
Evaluation signals
- Word error rate for ASR.
- Naturalness, intelligibility, and speaker similarity for TTS.
- Latency for streaming voice interfaces.
- Robustness to noise, accents, domain vocabulary, and code-switching.
- Consent, likeness, watermarking, and abuse risk for generated voices.
Pitfall
Voice quality demos can hide operational weakness. Production voice systems must handle noise, interruptions, turn-taking, latency, accents, and safety boundaries.
Connects to: tokenization · streaming latency · voice provenance