EmergentTTS-Eval: Evaluating TTS Models on Complex Prosodic, Expressiveness, and Linguistic Challenges Using Model-as-a-Judge
Ruskin Raj Manku, Yuzhi Tang, Xingjian Shi, Mu Li, Alexander Smola
Text-to-Speech (TTS) benchmarks often fail to capture how well models handle nuanced and semantically complex text. Building on $\textit{EmergentTTS}$, we introduce $\textit{EmergentTTS-Eval}$, a comprehensive benchmark covering six challenging TTS scenarios: emotions, paralinguistics, foreign words, syntactic complexity, complex pronunciation (e.g. URLs, formulas), and questions. Crucially, our framework automates both test-generation and evaluation, making the benchmark easily extensible. Starting from a small set of human-written seed prompts, we iteratively extend them using LLMs to target specific structural, phonetic and prosodic challenges, resulting in 1,645 diverse test samples. Moreover, we employ a model-as-a-judge approach, using a Large Audio Language Model (LALM) to assess the speech across multiple dimensions such as expressed emotion, prosodic, intonational, and pronunciation accuracy. We evaluate state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary TTS systems, such as 11Labs, Deepgram, and OpenAI's 4o-mini-TTS, on EmergentTTS-Eval, demonstrating its ability to reveal fine-grained performance differences. Results show that the model-as-a-judge approach offers robust TTS assessment and a high correlation with human preferences. We open-source the code and the benchmark.