# Scaling Rich Style-Prompted Text-to-Speech Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04713 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04713/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2025.

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

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [emotion2vec: Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Speech Emotion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15185/) (2023)
- [Emilia: An Extensive, Multilingual, and Diverse Speech Dataset for Large-Scale Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05361/) (2024)
- [Dawn of the transformer era in speech emotion recognition: closing the valence gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07378/) (2022)
- [Audiobox: Unified Audio Generation with Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15821/) (2023)
- [VoiceCraft: Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16973/) (2024)
- [LibriTTS-R: A Restored Multi-Speaker Text-to-Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18802/) (2023)
- [EXPRESSO: A Benchmark and Analysis of Discrete Expressive Speech Resynthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05725/) (2023)
- [InstructTTS: Modelling Expressive TTS in Discrete Latent Space with Natural Language Style Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13662/) (2023)
- [Distil-Whisper: Robust Knowledge Distillation via Large-Scale Pseudo Labelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00430/) (2023)
- [Natural language guidance of high-fidelity text-to-speech with synthetic annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01912/) (2024)
- [EARS: An Anechoic Fullband Speech Dataset Benchmarked for Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06185/) (2024)
- [VoiceFixer: Toward General Speech Restoration with Neural Vocoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13731/) (2021)
- [TextrolSpeech: A Text Style Control Speech Corpus With Codec Language Text-to-Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14430/) (2023)
- [PromptTTS 2: Describing and Generating Voices with Text Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02285/) (2023)
- [VALL-E R: Robust and Efficient Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis via Monotonic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07855/) (2024)
- [PromptStyle: Controllable Style Transfer for Text-to-Speech with Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19522/) (2023)
- [Brouhaha: multi-task training for voice activity detection, speech-to-noise ratio, and C50 room acoustics estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13248/) (2022)
- [SpeechCraft: A Fine-grained Expressive Speech Dataset with Natural Language Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13608/) (2024)
- [Cross-domain Neural Pitch and Periodicity Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12258/) (2023)
- [LibriTTS-P: A Corpus with Speaking Style and Speaker Identity Prompts for Text-to-Speech and Style Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07969/) (2024)
- [Speech-based Age and Gender Prediction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16962/) (2023)
- [EmoKnob: Enhance Voice Cloning with Fine-Grained Emotion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00316/) (2024)
- [MM-TTS: Multi-modal Prompt based Style Transfer for Expressive Text-to-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10687/) (2023)
- [VoxSim: A perceptual voice similarity dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18505/) (2024)
- [Voice Attribute Editing with Text Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08857/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [OmniVoice: Towards Omnilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00688/) (2026)
- [InstructTTSEval: Benchmarking Complex Natural-Language Instruction Following in Text-to-Speech Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16381/) (2025)
- [NonverbalTTS: A Public English Corpus of Text-Aligned Nonverbal Vocalizations with Emotion Annotations for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13155/) (2025)
- [CapSpeech: Enabling Downstream Applications in Style-Captioned Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02863/) (2025)
- [Voxlect: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Modeling Dialects and Regional Languages Around the Globe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01691/) (2025)
- [Vevo2: A Unified and Controllable Framework for Speech and Singing Voice Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16332/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Audio-language Pretraining for Learning General-purpose Audio Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16757/) (2025)
- [Bagpiper: Solving Open-Ended Audio Tasks via Rich Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05220/) (2026)
- [DIFFA-2: A Practical Diffusion Large Language Model for General Audio Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23161/) (2026)
- [MoE-TTS: Enhancing Out-of-Domain Text Understanding for Description-based TTS via Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11326/) (2025)
- [Minimizing Modality Gap from the Input Side: Your Speech LLM Can Be a Prosody-Aware Text LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05927/) (2026)
- [HoliTok: A Continuous Holistic Tokenization with Robust Dual Capabilities of Speech Generation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29948/) (2026)
- [VoxGuard: Evaluating User and Attribute Privacy in Speech via Membership Inference Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18413/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Strong Supervision: A Data-Centric Study of General-Purpose Audio Pre-Training Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25767/) (2026)
- [ParaSpeechCLAP: A Dual-Encoder Speech-Text Model for Rich Stylistic Language-Audio Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28737/) (2026)
- [VoiceDesigner: Text-to-Voice Generation and Editing via Unified Diffusion Modeling and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13613/) (2026)
- [ParA-LLM: A Unified Approach to Paralinguistic and Acoustic Speech Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22771/) (2026)
- [AphaVoice: Text-to-Speech Model for Aphasia Patient Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14479/) (2026)
- [VoTSpeech: Decoupling Voice Design from Speech Generation in Instruction-Following TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14694/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Paralinguistic Speech Captions (ParaSpeechCaps), a large-scale dataset that annotates speech utterances with rich style captions. While rich abstract tags (e.g. guttural, nasal, pained) have been explored in small-scale human-annotated datasets, existing large-scale datasets only cover basic tags (e.g. low-pitched, slow, loud). We combine off-the-shelf text and speech embedders, classifiers and an audio language model to automatically scale rich tag annotations for the first time. ParaSpeechCaps covers a total of 59 style tags, including both speaker-level intrinsic tags and utterance-level situational tags. It consists of 342 hours of human-labelled data (PSC-Base) and 2427 hours of automatically annotated data (PSC-Scaled). We finetune Parler-TTS, an open-source style-prompted TTS model, on ParaSpeechCaps, and achieve improved style consistency (+7.9% Consistency MOS) and speech quality (+15.5% Naturalness MOS) over the best performing baseline that combines existing rich style tag datasets. We ablate several of our dataset design choices to lay the foundation for future work in this space. Our dataset, models and code are released at https://github.com/ajd12342/paraspeechcaps .