# Continuous Speech Tokenizer in Text To Speech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17081 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17081/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Efficient Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06732/) (2020)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Practice: A Survey on ChatGPT and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13712/) (2023)
- [AudioPaLM: A Large Language Model That Can Speak and Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12925/) (2023)
- [CosyVoice: A Scalable Multilingual Zero-shot Text-to-speech Synthesizer based on Supervised Semantic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05407/) (2024)
- [NISQA: A Deep CNN-Self-Attention Model for Multidimensional Speech Quality Prediction with Crowdsourced Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09494/) (2021)
- [MOSNet: Deep Learning based Objective Assessment for Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08352/) (2019)
- [UniAudio: An Audio Foundation Model Toward Universal Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00704/) (2023)
- [HiFi-Codec: Group-residual Vector quantization for High Fidelity Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02765/) (2023)
- [VioLA: Unified Codec Language Models for Speech Recognition, Synthesis, and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16107/) (2023)
- [Autoregressive Speech Synthesis without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08551/) (2024)
- [SpeechX: Neural Codec Language Model as a Versatile Speech Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06873/) (2023)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition using Advanced Deep Learning Approaches: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01255/) (2024)
- [AudioDec: An Open-source Streaming High-fidelity Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16608/) (2023)
- [Towards audio language modeling -- an overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13236/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Efficient Training of Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01107/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Speech Discrete Tokens or Continuous Features? A Comparative Analysis for Spoken Language Understanding in SpeechLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17863/) (2025)
- [HoliTok: A Continuous Holistic Tokenization with Robust Dual Capabilities of Speech Generation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29948/) (2026)
- [Unlocking Speech-Text Compositional Powers: Instruction-Following Speech Language Models without Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02214/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The fusion of speech and language in the era of large language models has garnered significant attention. Discrete speech token is often utilized in text-to-speech tasks for speech compression and portability, which is convenient for joint training with text and have good compression efficiency. However, we found that the discrete speech tokenizer still suffers from information loss. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective continuous speech tokenizer named Cont-SPT, and a text-to-speech model based on continuous speech tokens. Our results show that the speech language model based on the continuous speech tokenizer has better continuity and higher estimated Mean Opinion Scores (MoS). This enhancement is attributed to better information preservation rate of the continuous speech tokenizer across both low and high frequencies in the frequency domain. The code and resources for Cont-SPT can be found in https://github.com/Yixing-Li/Continuous-Speech-Tokenizer
