# Building and Evaluating Fixed-Voice Thai TTS from Synthetic Speech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03502 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03502/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [ECAPA-TDNN: Emphasized Channel Attention, Propagation and Aggregation in TDNN Based Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07143/) (2020)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06103/) (2021)
- [StyleTTS 2: Towards Human-Level Text-to-Speech through Style Diffusion and Adversarial Training with Large Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07691/) (2023)
- [MiniMax-Speech: Intrinsic Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with a Learnable Speaker Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07916/) (2025)
- [GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11546/) (2024)
- [PyThaiNLP: Thai Natural Language Processing in Python](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04649/) (2023)
- [Phoneme-Level BERT for Enhanced Prosody of Text-to-Speech with Grapheme Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08810/) (2023)
- [Incompressible Knowledge Probes: Estimating Black-Box LLM Parameter Counts via Factual Capacity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24827/) (2026)
- [WangchanThaiInstruct: An instruction-following Dataset for Culture-Aware, Multitask, and Multi-domain Evaluation in Thai](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15239/) (2025)
- [Typhoon ASR Real-time: FastConformer-Transducer for Thai Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13044/) (2026)
- [Rapid Speaker Adaptation in Low Resource Text to Speech Systems using Synthetic Data and Transfer learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01107/) (2023)
- [Inferring the Size of Large Language Models From Popular Text Memorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29223/) (2026)

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

- [Paradee: Distilling Kokoro-82M into an 8M-Parameter Single-Voice Text-to-Speech Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06817/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In low-resource settings, deploying TTS typically requires choosing between a large voice-cloning model with costly inference or a compact fixed-voice system that requires a speaker-specific corpus. We study a third route: using a large voice-cloning model as a programmable data source to turn a short voice reference (e.g., 15 seconds) into a compact fixed-voice student trained entirely on synthetic speech. This setting makes pipeline design consequential: teacher errors become training targets, while filtering failed generations can reduce coverage of difficult texts. Thai further introduces challenges from ambiguous word boundaries, lexical tone, names and loanwords, numeric verbalization, and Thai-English code-switching. We study how text preparation, synthetic generation, quality filtering, rejection sampling, and frontend choices affect the resulting student, and where teacher limitations remain. We evaluate CER, Challenge-Set Keyword Accuracy, Prosody Pause Accuracy, speaker similarity, and speaking rate. The resulting 82M-parameter model, Wayu-Paxa-TTS-Edge, enables on-device Thai TTS without reference audio. It achieves 68.2% Challenge-Set Keyword Accuracy (85.5% of Gemini 3.1) and 91.4% pause precision, outperforming its OmniVoice teacher (89.9%) and reaching 94.8% of Gemini 3.1. It also achieves the lowest pause-placement error and intra-word pause rates among the three systems, and 3.7% and 1.1% CER on Thai and English, respectively. We open-source the model and evaluation framework for Thai TTS development.