Beyond Unified Models: A Service-Oriented Approach to Low Latency, Context Aware Phonemization for Real Time TTS
Mahta Fetrat Qharabagh, Donya Navabi, Zahra Dehghanian, Morteza Abolghasemi, Hamid R. Rabiee
Abstract
Lightweight, real-time text-to-speech systems are crucial for accessibility. However, the most efficient TTS models often rely on lightweight phonemizers that struggle with context-dependent challenges. In contrast, more advanced phonemizers with a deeper linguistic understanding typically incur high computational costs, which prevents real-time performance. This paper examines the trade-off between phonemization quality and inference speed in G2P-aided TTS systems, introducing a practical framework to bridge this gap. We propose lightweight strategies for context-aware phonemization and a service-oriented TTS architecture that executes these modules as independent services. This design decouples heavy context-aware components from the core TTS engine, effectively breaking the latency barrier and enabling real-time use of high-quality phonemization models. Experimental results confirm that the proposed system improves pronunciation soundness and linguistic accuracy while maintaining real-time responsiveness, making it well-suited for offline and end-device TTS applications.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.eacl-industry.12
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Rabat, Morocco
- Editors:
- Yevgen Matusevych, Gülşen Eryiğit, Nikolaos Aletras
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 157–168
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-industry.12/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Mahta Fetrat Qharabagh, Donya Navabi, Zahra Dehghanian, Morteza Abolghasemi, and Hamid R. Rabiee. 2026. Beyond Unified Models: A Service-Oriented Approach to Low Latency, Context Aware Phonemization for Real Time TTS. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track), pages 157–168, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Beyond Unified Models: A Service-Oriented Approach to Low Latency, Context Aware Phonemization for Real Time TTS (Qharabagh et al., EACL 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-industry.12.pdf