mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis

arXiv 1703.10135 ↗First posted 29 Mar 2017cs.CL cs.LG cs.SDcited by 490

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Cited by 47 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

A text-to-speech synthesis system typically consists of multiple stages, such as a text analysis frontend, an acoustic model and an audio synthesis module. Building these components often requires extensive domain expertise and may contain brittle design choices. In this paper, we present Tacotron, an end-to-end generative text-to-speech model that synthesizes speech directly from characters. Given <text, audio> pairs, the model can be trained completely from scratch with random initialization. We present several key techniques to make the sequence-to-sequence framework perform well for this challenging task. Tacotron achieves a 3.82 subjective 5-scale mean opinion score on US English, outperforming a production parametric system in terms of naturalness. In addition, since Tacotron generates speech at the frame level, it's substantially faster than sample-level autoregressive methods.

Key facts. Cited by 490 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2017.

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Citing papers per year: 2020: 1; 2021: 107; 2022: 125; 2023: 86; 2024: 76; 2025: 54; 2026: 41.

490 papers.

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  1. 2020DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesiscited by 1,354
  2. 2024CosyVoice 2: Scalable Streaming Speech Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 288
  3. 2022Diffsound: Discrete Diffusion Model for Text-to-sound Generationcited by 257
  4. 2023NaturalSpeech 2: Latent Diffusion Models are Natural and Zero-Shot Speech and Singing Synthesizerscited by 235
  5. 2024NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Modelscited by 226
  6. 2021A Survey on Neural Speech Synthesiscited by 184
  7. 2022MERLOT Reserve: Neural Script Knowledge through Vision and Language and Soundcited by 184
  8. 2021FakeAVCeleb: A Novel Audio-Video Multimodal Deepfake Datasetcited by 181
  9. 2024MaskGCT: Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Masked Generative Codec Transformercited by 161
  10. 2021Diff-TTS: A Denoising Diffusion Model for Text-to-Speechcited by 157
  11. 2022NaturalSpeech: End-to-End Text to Speech Synthesis with Human-Level Qualitycited by 152
  12. 2025CosyVoice 3: Towards In-the-wild Speech Generation via Scaling-up and Post-trainingcited by 150
38 more
  1. 2021Direct speech-to-speech translation with discrete unitscited by 149
  2. 2022ProDiff: Progressive Fast Diffusion Model For High-Quality Text-to-Speechcited by 149
  3. 2021Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation on Real Datacited by 121
  4. 2021Text-Free Prosody-Aware Generative Spoken Language Modelingcited by 119
  5. 2025Step-Audio 2 Technical Reportcited by 105
  6. 2021AdaSpeech: Adaptive Text to Speech for Custom Voicecited by 98
  7. 2022ADD 2022: the First Audio Deep Synthesis Detection Challengecited by 96
  8. 2021Meta-StyleSpeech : Multi-Speaker Adaptive Text-to-Speech Generationcited by 93
  9. 2023VioLA: Unified Codec Language Models for Speech Recognition, Synthesis, and Translationcited by 87
  10. 2021Guided-TTS: A Diffusion Model for Text-to-Speech via Classifier Guidancecited by 84
  11. 2021Deepfakes Generation and Detection: State-of-the-art, open challenges, countermeasures, and way forwardcited by 82
  12. 2023A Survey on Audio Diffusion Models: Text To Speech Synthesis and Enhancement in Generative AIcited by 68
  13. 2023A Comprehensive Review of Data-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generationcited by 66
  14. 2021WaveGrad 2: Iterative Refinement for Text-to-Speech Synthesiscited by 65
  15. 2024Autoregressive Speech Synthesis without Vector Quantizationcited by 65
  16. 2022A Survey on Non-Autoregressive Generation for Neural Machine Translation and Beyondcited by 64
  17. 2023TableGPT: Towards Unifying Tables, Nature Language and Commands into One GPTcited by 59
  18. 2025DiTAR: Diffusion Transformer Autoregressive Modeling for Speech Generationcited by 57
  19. 2021PnG BERT: Augmented BERT on Phonemes and Graphemes for Neural TTScited by 52
  20. 2023Mega-TTS: Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech at Scale with Intrinsic Inductive Biascited by 51
  21. 2024ELLA-V: Stable Neural Codec Language Modeling with Alignment-guided Sequence Reorderingcited by 50
  22. 2023PromptTTS 2: Describing and Generating Voices with Text Promptcited by 48
  23. 2025Algorithm Discovery With LLMs: Evolutionary Search Meets Reinforcement Learningcited by 46
  24. 2023CoMoSpeech: One-Step Speech and Singing Voice Synthesis via Consistency Modelcited by 45
  25. 2021Half-Truth: A Partially Fake Audio Detection Datasetcited by 44
  26. 2022DiffGAN-TTS: High-Fidelity and Efficient Text-to-Speech with Denoising Diffusion GANscited by 43
  27. 2023Glitch in the Matrix: A Large Scale Benchmark for Content Driven Audio-Visual Forgery Detection and Localizationcited by 43
  28. 2022Multi-instrument Music Synthesis with Spectrogram Diffusioncited by 42
  29. 2022Lip to Speech Synthesis with Visual Context Attentional GANcited by 41
  30. 2024Denoising Vision Transformerscited by 40
  31. 2021Neural Dubber: Dubbing for Videos According to Scriptscited by 39
  32. 2023Transformers in Speech Processing: A Surveycited by 39
  33. 2024Foundation Models for Music: A Surveycited by 37
  34. 2022Emotion Intensity and its Control for Emotional Voice Conversioncited by 35
  35. 2022Guided-TTS 2: A Diffusion Model for High-quality Adaptive Text-to-Speech with Untranscribed Datacited by 35
  36. 2023HierSpeech++: Bridging the Gap between Semantic and Acoustic Representation of Speech by Hierarchical Variational Inference for Zero-shot Speech Synthesiscited by 35
  37. 2024Autoregressive Diffusion Transformer for Text-to-Speech Synthesiscited by 34
  38. 2022StyleTTS: A Style-Based Generative Model for Natural and Diverse Text-to-Speech Synthesiscited by 33

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