A Speech Dataset of Fictional Character Utterances for Expressive
Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis
Anonymous Authors
Abstract:
Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) have been driven by large, multi-domain speech corpora, yet the expressive potential of audiobook data remains underexamined. We argue that human-narrated audiobooks, particularly fictional works, contain rich and diverse prosodic cues arising from the natural alternation between neutral narration and expressive character dialogue. To harness this expressivity, we introduce LibriQuote, a large-scale 5.3K hours of expressive speech drawn from character quotations.
Each quote is supplemented with contextual pseudo-labels for speech verbs and adverbs that characterize the intended delivery of direct speech (e.g., "he whispered softly").
Using LibriQuote to fine-tune a state-of-the-art autoregressive TTS model yields substantial improvements in intelligibility on out-of-domain data, while training from scratch enhances expressive rendering of character dialogue.
Benchmarking on LibriQuote-test highlights significant variability across systems in generating expressive speech.
We publicly release the dataset, code, and evaluation resources to facilitate reproducible benchmarking and foster progress toward more expressive TTS systems.
Figure 1. t-SNE projection of emotion vector representations computed with emotion2vec-plus-base. LibriQuote-test (a) quotations and (b) reference narration (non-quotation) utterances; (c) Subsample of LibriHeavy segments (\(N=5734\)).
This page is for research demonstration purposes only.
LibriQuote-test Set
Here, we provide the 30 samples used for the subjective experiments on LibriQuote-test set.
Reference
Text
Ground-Truth
SparkTTS
F5-TTS
MaskGCT
IndexTTS2
IndexTTS2-Context
What have you been doing with yourself lately?
No, he would n't; He'd like it and respect you for doing it. But, Polly, it would have been a grand thing for you.
How came I to adventure and play with my life by coming to the country of the Greeks?
I commit him to your care, as you value your lives,
I wore it all through the campaign. Your true warrior is no dandy!
and, if you really mean it, perhaps the old Sausage-Glutton can manage it for you. He's done more wonderful things than that in his time, I can tell you.
This is no mortal, this is naught save a noble angel
From the parts of Hind, O my mother; and I have come to this city to see the world and look about me.
Haven't heard any one talking about him, eh? Come ashore yesterday.
But I'll -- yes, I'll give you a guinea, if you will let me out.
is he afraid? Will the Hurons hear his groans?
That our march is come to a quick end, and that we are in an enemy’s country,
Did you indeed bring horse and arms down this ladder, Warrenton?
The two who lead them are not uniformed -- like as not they are those treacherous ones whom I have such cause to remember.
Pa, mayn’t Tom and Sid and me go to the show?
Well, it’s all terrible sad; but we’ve all got to go, one time or another. So what we want to do is to be prepared; then we’re all right.
This is the best yet -- except for Amos. Golly Moses!
that our bricks for building houses have all come from British kilns?
Where did you ever find such gold work, Bartley?
Aren’t you afraid to let the wind low like that on your neck? Can’t I get a scarf or something?
Yes. You're a good friend. I'll return it in a day or two.
Oh, yes, indeed, sir! I don't want to meet strangers -- and -- and -- I'm not very strong yet. I thank you for considering my feelings so kindly.
Extra air inside, and the best we could do for food. Was gonna try myself, but I don't know Praeger,
Either of you know where I can buy stencils and ink and find some kind of a truck to haul this paper along?
you mustn't expect me for to believe that. I may believe that the moon is made of green cheese, but I won't believe that that's a 'ammer.
Ah, then, she'd never put us off with a newspaper,
I’ve never seen one like him. He did what he wished.
you will make me the less welcome upon that account.
you will be sure to be ready to go with me to East Hall this evening?
I believe poor Annie is dreadfully unhappy.
Other Samples & Models
In this section, we provide additional samples of LibriQuote-test set generated by all the models we tested.
Reference
Text
Narrative Cue
Ground-Truth
SparkTTS
SparkTTS\(_{\text{FT}, Q}\)
SparkTTS\(_{\text{FT}, Q_f}\)
SparkTTS\(_{\text{Scratch}}\)
SparkTTS\(_{\text{Scratch} + \text{Context}}\)
F5-TTS
MaskGCT
IndexTTS2
IndexTTS2-Context
will that shut you up?
{'growled': {'type': 'verb'}}
does not faithfully serve the masters whom he voluntarily chose for himself.
Impossible to tell how close behind the Venture may be. We have come quickly, but they have the faster ship. I have no wish to give them more clue than necessary as to where we may be.
{'muttered': {'type': 'verb'}}
Those fellows are all very loyal, even Mainhall. They don’t talk of any one else as they do of you.
Praise be to Allah for the welfare of this youth! O Allah, I beseech Thee by Thy knowledge of hidden things, that Thou make the salvation of this youth to be at my hands!
