Title: UltraVoice: Scaling Fine-Grained Style-Controlled Speech Conversations for Spoken Dialogue Models
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: spoken dialogue models, fine-grained speech style control, dataset

Abstract: Spoken dialogue models currently lack the ability for fine-grained speech style control, a critical capability for human-like interaction that is often overlooked in favor of purely functional capabilities like reasoning and question answering. To address this limitation, we introduce \textbf{UltraVoice}, the first large-scale speech dialogue dataset engineered for multiple fine-grained speech style control. Encompassing over 830 hours of speech dialogues, UltraVoice provides instructions across six key speech stylistic dimensions: emotion, speed, volume, accent, language, and composite styles. Fine-tuning leading models such as SLAM-Omni and VocalNet on UltraVoice significantly enhances their fine-grained speech stylistic controllability without degrading core conversational abilities. Specifically, our fine-tuned models achieve improvements of 29.12-42.33\% in Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and 14.61-40.09 percentage points in Instruction Following Rate (IFR) on multi-dimensional control tasks designed in the UltraVoice. Moreover, on the URO-Bench benchmark, our fine-tuned models demonstrate substantial gains in core understanding, reasoning, and conversational abilities, with average improvements of +10.84\% on the Basic setting and +7.87\% on the Pro setting. Furthermore, the dataset's utility extends to training controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS) models, underscoring its high quality and broad applicability for expressive speech synthesis.

TL;DR: We introduce UltraVoice, a large dataset for teaching spoken models fine-grained speech style control, improving expressiveness while boosting conversational skills.