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TED-TTS: Training-Free Intra-Utterance Emotion and Duration Control for Text-to-Speech Synthesis

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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 TED-TTS, 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. Code and audio samples are available.

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

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Emotional Text-to-SpeechESD (English)--
16
Emotional Text-to-SpeechESD MED-TTS (Chinese)
CER0.0379
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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