ProPS: Prompted Profile Synthesis for Natural Language-Conditioned Speaker Embedding Distributions

2026-07-06Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence
AI summary

The authors created ProPS, a system that can generate speaker voice characteristics based on simple text descriptions like 'a thirties male speaker with an Indian accent.' Instead of just describing existing voices, ProPS learns to create new voice profiles by linking language descriptions to patterns found in real speaker data. It uses a special type of model to predict how voices should sound according to the given description. Their tests show that ProPS can create voices matching requested traits like age or accent, helping applications such as speech synthesis or voice conversion.

speaker embeddingsx-vectorsGaussian mixture modelmixture density networktext-to-speech (TTS)voice conversionnatural language promptsprofile synthesisspeech representationattribute classification
Authors
Thomas Thebaud, Junhyeok Lee, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Jesus Villalba Lopez, Najim Dehak
Abstract
Speaker embeddings, or x-vectors, are widely used to represent speaker identity and speaker-related attributes, but existing embedding extractors are typically descriptive rather than generative: they map an observed speech segment to an x-vector, which is then used for downstream applications. We introduce ProPS, Prompted Profile Synthesis, a framework for generating distributions of speaker embeddings conditioned on natural language prompts such as "a thirties male speaker with an Indian accent". ProPS converts human-written profile descriptions into sentence embeddings and uses a mixture density network trained on a large-scale dataset to predict a Gaussian mixture model in the x-vector space. The model is trained by maximizing the likelihood that real speaker embeddings match the requested profile, and its generated distributions are evaluated by negative log-likelihood on held-out x-vectors and by attribute classification accuracies on sampled synthetic x-vectors. Experiments show that ProPS produces profile-conditioned distributions and generates x-vectors that preserve requested speaker attributes such as age, gender, accent, and prosodic characteristics. This design enables controllable speaker-profile synthesis for speech generation systems like Text-To-Speech (TTS) or Voice Conversion (VC) while anchoring generated distributions in observed speaker-embedding structure.