# Unified speech and gesture synthesis using flow matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05181/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 32 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06103/) (2021)
- [Grad-TTS: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06337/) (2021)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [WaveGlow: A Flow-based Generative Network for Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00002/) (2018)
- [Glow-TTS: A Generative Flow for Text-to-Speech via Monotonic Alignment Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11129/) (2020)
- [BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04658/) (2022)
- [Listen, Denoise, Action! Audio-Driven Motion Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09707/) (2022)
- [GestureDiffuCLIP: Gesture Diffusion Model with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14613/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Review of Data-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05339/) (2023)
- [The GENEA Challenge 2022: A large evaluation of data-driven co-speech gesture generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10441/) (2022)
- [A large, crowdsourced evaluation of gesture generation systems on common data: The GENEA Challenge 2020](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11617/) (2021)
- [Let's Face It: Probabilistic Multi-modal Interlocutor-aware Generation of Facial Gestures in Dyadic Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09888/) (2020)
- [DurIAN: Duration Informed Attention Network For Multimodal Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01700/) (2019)
- [Evaluating gesture generation in a large-scale open challenge: The GENEA Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08737/) (2023)
- [The GENEA Challenge 2023: A large scale evaluation of gesture generation models in monadic and dyadic settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12646/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-Based Co-Speech Gesture Generation Using Joint Text and Audio Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05455/) (2023)
- [The Case for Translation-Invariant Self-Attention in Transformer-Based Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01950/) (2021)
- [Integrated Speech and Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11436/) (2021)
- [Diff-TTSG: Denoising probabilistic integrated speech and gesture synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09417/) (2023)
- [Generating coherent spontaneous speech and gesture from text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05684/) (2021)
- [OverFlow: Putting flows on top of neural transducers for better TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06892/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Fake it to make it: Using synthetic data to remedy the data shortage in joint multimodal speech-and-gesture synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19622/) (2024)
- [Gelina: Unified Speech and Gesture Synthesis via Interleaved Token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12834/) (2025)
- [ImaGGen: Zero-Shot Generation of Co-Speech Semantic Gestures Grounded in Language and Image Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17617/) (2025)
- [Gesture2Speech: How Far Can Hand Movements Shape Expressive Speech?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19831/) (2026)
- [Motion-Omni: End-to-End Joint Speech and Full-Body Motion for Spoken Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04250/) (2026)
- [DualTrack: Synchronized speech-gesture generation via symmetric coupling of pretrained priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36624/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As text-to-speech technologies achieve remarkable naturalness in read-aloud tasks, there is growing interest in multimodal synthesis of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviour, such as spontaneous speech and associated body gestures. This paper presents a novel, unified architecture for jointly synthesising speech acoustics and skeleton-based 3D gesture motion from text, trained using optimal-transport conditional flow matching (OT-CFM). The proposed architecture is simpler than the previous state of the art, has a smaller memory footprint, and can capture the joint distribution of speech and gestures, generating both modalities together in one single process. The new training regime, meanwhile, enables better synthesis quality in much fewer steps (network evaluations) than before. Uni- and multimodal subjective tests demonstrate improved speech naturalness, gesture human-likeness, and cross-modal appropriateness compared to existing benchmarks. Please see https://shivammehta25.github.io/Match-TTSG/ for video examples and code.