COT-TTS: Audio Context-Aware Text-to-Speech with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

2026-09-18

AI Summary

为了解决自然对话中语音风格自适应问题，提出COT-TTS系统，通过链式推理理解对话上下文并生成目标语音。

Abstract

Recently, text-to-speech systems have made significant progress in speech expressiveness and controllability. However, the speaking style of generated speech typically relies on clear user-specified instructions. In natural conversations, speaking style should be naturally inferred from the preceding conversational context. Therefore, we propose COT-TTS, a context-aware, reasoning-based text-to-speech task. Given historical conversation audio, target text, and a reference speech, the system should comprehend the conversational context, infer an explicit intermediate reasoning, and finally synthesize the target speech with the specified timbre. To support this task, we constructed a large-scale bilingual conversational speech dataset comprising 9 million training samples, including a high-quality subset of 1 million samples. We further constructed a source-disjoint benchmark with 800 human-verified samples and established strong task-specific baselines. Additionally, we developed end-to-end autoregressive models with parameter sizes of 0.6B and 1.7B, generating emotion-labeled transcripts, editable speech style inferences, and speech tokens. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves performance comparable to large-scale baseline systems with significantly fewer parameters. At the same time, the model performs well in terms of duration consistency and emotional consistency, and can generate appropriate emotional, stress, and rhythmic variations based on the conversational context. To facilitate future research, we will publicly release the data construction pipeline, dataset, trained models, and related resources. The demo page and additional resources are available at https://luckybian.github.io/COT-TTS

Problem

• Text-to-Speech
• Conversational Context
• Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Innovation

• context-aware
• chain-of-thought reasoning
• bilingual conversational speech dataset
• autoregressive models
• emotional consistency