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arXiv · 2610.19774

Long-Prompt Zero-Shot TTS: Benchmarking Prosody Reproduction Beyond Voice Cloning

Dekun Chen·Renjie Xu·Yingda Shen·Qinke Ni·Zhizheng Wu
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Abstract

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) typically conditions on a short speech prompt, which conveys timbre but provides only limited evidence of a speaker's prosodic patterns. We formulate Long-Prompt Zero-Shot TTS, a task that uses long speech prompts at inference time to reproduce speaker-specific prosody without target-speaker fine-tuning. We introduce LP-TTS-Bench, a bilingual benchmark of 37 speakers with 63.95 prompt hours and 2,728 held-out test utterances. Beyond intelligibility and timbre similarity, LP-TTS-Bench evaluates timing, prominence, intonation, and model-based prosody metrics, enabling multidimensional evaluation of prosody reproduction. As a reference system, we develop LPTTS, whose hierarchical Long-Prompt Encoder compresses long speech prompts into a fixed number of continuous prosody vectors. Experiments show improvements in several prosodic dimensions over a short-prompt baseline, with overall gains as prompt duration increases up to approximately 10 minutes and saturation at longer durations.

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Dekun Chen, Renjie Xu, Yingda Shen, Qinke Ni, Zhizheng Wu. 2026-10-14. Long-Prompt Zero-Shot TTS: Benchmarking Prosody Reproduction Beyond Voice Cloning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19774

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