Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey

Tianxin Xie, Yan Rong, Pengfei Zhang, Wenwu Wang, Li Liu


Abstract
Text-to-speech (TTS) has advanced from generating natural-sounding speech to enabling fine-grained control over attributes like emotion, timbre, and style. Driven by rising industrial demand and breakthroughs in deep learning, e.g., diffusion and large language models (LLMs), controllable TTS has become a rapidly growing research area. This survey provides **the first** comprehensive review of controllable TTS methods, from traditional control techniques to emerging approaches using natural language prompts. We categorize model architectures, control strategies, and feature representations, while also summarizing challenges, datasets, and evaluations in controllable TTS. This survey aims to guide researchers and practitioners by offering a clear taxonomy and highlighting future directions in this fast-evolving field. One can visit https://github.com/imxtx/awesome-controllabe-speech-synthesis for a comprehensive paper list and updates.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.40
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
764–791
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.40/
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Cite (ACL):
Tianxin Xie, Yan Rong, Pengfei Zhang, Wenwu Wang, and Li Liu. 2025. Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 764–791, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey (Xie et al., EMNLP 2025)
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