LLMVoX: Autoregressive Streaming Text-to-Speech Model for Any LLM
Authors: name: Sambal Shikhar; name: Mohammed Irfan Kurpath; name: Sahal Shaji Mullappilly; name: Jean Lahoud; name: Fahad Khan; name: Rao Muhammad Anwer; name: Salman Khan; name: Hisham Cholakkal
Published: 2025-03-06 18:59:38

Abstract: Recent advancements in speech-to-speech dialogue systems leverage LLMs for
multimodal interactions, yet they remain hindered by fine-tuning requirements,
high computational overhead, and text-speech misalignment. Existing
speech-enabled LLMs often degrade conversational quality by modifying the LLM,
thereby compromising its linguistic capabilities. In contrast, we propose
LLMVoX, a lightweight 30M-parameter, LLM-agnostic, autoregressive streaming TTS
system that generates high-quality speech with low latency, while fully
preserving the capabilities of the base LLM. Our approach achieves a
significantly lower Word Error Rate compared to speech-enabled LLMs, while
operating at comparable latency and UTMOS score. By decoupling speech synthesis
from LLM processing via a multi-queue token streaming system, LLMVoX supports
seamless, infinite-length dialogues. Its plug-and-play design also facilitates
extension to various tasks with different backbones. Furthermore, LLMVoX
generalizes to new languages with only dataset adaptation, attaining a low
Character Error Rate on an Arabic speech task. Additionally, we have integrated
LLMVoX with a Vision-Language Model to create an omni-model with speech, text,
and vision capabilities, without requiring additional multimodal training. Our
code base and project page is available at https://mbzuai-oryx.github.io/LLMVoX .