What is the key data point required for emotion-aware Text-to-Speech (TTS) system training?
A style reference utterance embodying the target emotion
The data requirements for speech recognition (SER) and speech synthesis (TTS) diverge significantly due to their opposing goals. While SER requires a labeled utterance where a human provides the ground truth emotion associated with the spoken words, emotion-aware TTS requires a different crucial data element to teach the system *how* to sound. This key data point is the style reference utterance. This reference sample must possess the desired acoustic profile—the specific embodiment of the target emotion, such as excitement or calmness—even if the words spoken within that reference utterance are completely irrelevant to the final output sentence being generated. The TTS model learns to extract the spectral and prosodic fingerprint of the emotion from this reference, enabling it to apply that expressive style to entirely new linguistic content.
