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Segment-Aware Conditioning for Training-Free Intra-Utterance Emotion and Duration Control in Text-to-Speech

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While controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS) has achieved notable progress, most existing methods remain limited to inter-utterance-level control, making fine-grained intra-utterance expression challenging due to their reliance on non-public datasets or complex multi-stage training. In this paper, we propose a training-free controllable framework for pretrained zero-shot TTS to enable intra-utterance emotion and duration expression. Specifically, we propose a segment-aware emotion conditioning strategy that combines causal masking with monotonic stream alignment filtering to isolate emotion conditioning and schedule mask transitions, enabling smooth intra-utterance emotion shifts while preserving global semantic coherence. Based on this, we further propose a segment-aware duration steering strategy to combine local duration embedding steering with global EOS logit modulation, allowing local duration adjustment while ensuring globally consistent termination. To eliminate the need for segment-level manual prompt engineering, we construct a 30,000-sample multi-emotion and duration-annotated text dataset to enable LLM-based automatic prompt construction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our training-free method not only achieves state-of-the-art intra-utterance consistency in multi-emotion and duration control, but also maintains baseline-level speech quality of the underlying TTS model. Audio samples are available at https://aclanonymous111.github.io/TED-TTS-DemoPage/.

Qifan Liang, Yuansen Liu, Ruixin Wei, Nan Lu, Junchuan Zhao, Ye Wang• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Emotional Text-to-SpeechESD MED-TTS (Chinese)
CER0.0379
9
Emotional Text-to-SpeechESD (English)
WER2.519
9
Zero-shot Text-to-SpeechChinese Speech Emotion Prompt
WER0.0273
4
Zero-shot Text-to-SpeechEnglish Speech Emotion Prompt
WER0.0323
4
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