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:
Bibkey:
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)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-industry.12.pdf