X-VC: Zero-shot Streaming Voice Conversion in Codec Space
About
Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to convert a source utterance into the voice of an unseen target speaker while preserving its linguistic content. Although recent systems have improved conversion quality, building zero-shot VC systems for interactive scenarios remains challenging because high-fidelity speaker transfer and low-latency streaming inference are difficult to achieve simultaneously. In this work, we present X-VC, a zero-shot streaming VC system that performs one-step conversion in the latent space of a pretrained neural codec. X-VC uses a dual-conditioning acoustic converter that jointly models source codec latents and frame-level acoustic conditions derived from target reference speech, while injecting utterance-level target speaker information through adaptive normalization. To reduce the mismatch between training and inference, we train the model with generated paired data and a role-assignment strategy that combines standard, reconstruction, and reversed modes. For streaming inference, we further adopt a chunkwise inference scheme with overlap smoothing that is aligned with the segment-based training paradigm of the codec. Experiments on Seed-TTS-Eval show that X-VC achieves the best streaming WER in both English and Chinese, strong speaker similarity in same-language and cross-lingual settings, and substantially lower offline real-time factor than the compared baselines. These results suggest that codec-space one-step conversion is a practical approach for building high-quality low-latency zero-shot VC systems. Audio samples are available at https://x-vc.github.io. Our code and checkpoints will also be released.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voice Conversion | Seed-TTS zh (test) | WER1.99 | 9 | |
| Voice Conversion | Seed-TTS en (test) | WER2.83 | 7 | |
| Cross-lingual Voice Conversion | Seed-TTS-Eval Chinese-to-English | WER2.15 | 5 | |
| Cross-lingual Voice Conversion | Seed-TTS English-to-Chinese (Eval) | WER2.67 | 4 | |
| Zero-shot Voice Conversion | Seed-TTS-Eval zh (test) | SMOS Score3.89 | 3 | |
| Zero-shot Voice Conversion | Seed-TTS-Eval en (test) | SMOS3.98 | 2 |