Alignment-Free Text-Audiobox for Voice Dubbing and Full-Duplex Dialogue Synthesis
Abstract
We present Alignment-Free Text-Audiobox (Text-AB), a unified framework for high-quality voice dubbing and full-duplex dialogue synthesis. Building on a Diffusion Transformer trained with a flow-matching objective, Text-AB departs from the Audiobox system along three dimensions. First, it operates in a latent diffusion framework using DAC-VAE features that encode 48 kHz waveforms into a 25 Hz latent sequence, giving over 10x higher compression than previous EnCodec representations while improving resynthesis quality. Second, Text-AB is alignment-free: it consumes raw text via an off-the-shelf text encoder and learns text-speech alignment through cross-attention, removing the need for forced alignment and explicit duration prediction. Third, we scale model and data substantially, pretraining a 3B-parameter model on 480k hours of monolingual speech, followed by supervised fine-tuning on three downstream tasks: cross-lingual voice dubbing, full-duplex dialogue synthesis, and emotional full-duplex dialogue synthesis. At inference, Text-AB supports one-shot generation for up to ~1 min of speech and arbitrarily long-form generation via a multi-diffusion scheme, plus a multi-stage reranking strategy that enhances quality based on automated metrics. On a real-world dubbing benchmark, Text-AB delivers a step-change improvement over the latest internal dubbing system, with large gains in prosody similarity, voice similarity, naturalness, and shareability. For full-duplex dialogue synthesis, it approaches human recordings on short-form conversations and substantially outperforms the latest internal model on long-form human-likeness and expressivity, while natively modeling turn-taking, back-channeling, and emotional dynamics. For emotional dialogue synthesis, emotion conditioning significantly improves emotion alignment and emotional interaction quality over the unconditioned baseline.
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Research summary
The paper introduces Text-AB, a unified alignment-free diffusion framework for high-quality voice dubbing and full-duplex dialogue synthesis that leverages latent diffusion with high-compression VAE features and cross-attention for text-speech alignment. This work represents a strong technical advance in audio generation, particularly for complex tasks like full-duplex dialogue where modeling turn-taking and back-channeling is critical, and the shift to an alignment-free approach simplifies the pipeline significantly. While the components (Diffusion Transformer, flow matching, VAE) are established, their integration into a scalable, high-fidelity system for these specific downstream tasks constitutes a meaningful contribution to the field of speech synthesis and audio ML.
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