# Bagpiper-TTS: Natural Language Guided Universal Speech Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22811 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22811/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17765/) (2025)
- [Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10135/) (2017)
- [GigaSpeech: An Evolving, Multi-domain ASR Corpus with 10,000 Hours of Transcribed Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06909/) (2021)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06885/) (2024)
- [Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02430/) (2024)
- [CosyVoice 2: Scalable Streaming Speech Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10117/) (2024)
- [NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03100/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Neural Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15561/) (2021)
- [CosyVoice 3: Towards In-the-wild Speech Generation via Scaling-up and Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17589/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-TTS Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15621/) (2026)
- [Qwen3-ASR Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21337/) (2026)
- [LibriTTS-R: A Restored Multi-Speaker Text-to-Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18802/) (2023)
- [InstructTTS: Modelling Expressive TTS in Discrete Latent Space with Natural Language Style Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13662/) (2023)
- [Voxtlm: unified decoder-only models for consolidating speech recognition/synthesis and speech/text continuation tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07937/) (2023)
- [Codec Does Matter: Exploring the Semantic Shortcoming of Codec for Audio Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17175/) (2024)
- [YuE: Scaling Open Foundation Models for Long-Form Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08638/) (2025)
- [E3 TTS: Easy End-to-End Diffusion-based Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00945/) (2023)
- [Omni-Captioner: Data Pipeline, Models, and Benchmark for Omni Detailed Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12720/) (2025)
- [Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06602/) (2024)
- [MoonCast: High-Quality Zero-Shot Podcast Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14345/) (2025)
- [SimpleSpeech 2: Towards Simple and Efficient Text-to-Speech with Flow-based Scalar Latent Transformer Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13893/) (2024)
- [VIBEVOICE-ASR Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18184/) (2026)
- [OmniCharacter: Towards Immersive Role-Playing Agents with Seamless Speech-Language Personality Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20277/) (2025)
- [OpusLM: A Family of Open Unified Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17611/) (2025)
- [Bagpiper: Solving Open-Ended Audio Tasks via Rich Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05220/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SCIC: Scope- and Codebook-Aware Instruction Conditioning for Speaker-Adapted Expressive TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39088/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Classical TTS systems typically rely on rigid input formats and predefined metadata slots, limiting their ability to fulfill flexible user requirements. This paper introduces Bagpiper-TTS, a universal speech synthesis system that deals with diverse natural language user requests. Given a natural language prompt, Bagpiper-TTS first reasons over the users' intent to derive a rich caption, i.e., a comprehensive textual blueprint encompassing both transcription and nuanced metadata. Subsequently, this caption guides the synthesis of the target speech. Our model inherently supports a broad spectrum of tasks besides classical TTS applications, including multi-talker, intent-to-speech, role-play synthesis, singing voice synthesis, and more. Experimental results demonstrate that Bagpiper-TTS achieves an 1.7% Word Error Rate (WER) on the Seed-TTS-Eval benchmark and match the performance of dedicated models in both LLM-as-a-judge and human subjective evaluations across multiple applications.