X-VC: Zero-shot Streaming Voice Conversion in Codec Space

Abstract:Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to convert a source utterance into the voice of an unseen target speaker while preserving its linguistic content. Although recent systems have improved conversion quality, building zero-shot VC systems for interactive scenarios remains challenging because high-fidelity speaker transfer and low-latency streaming inference are difficult to achieve simultaneously. In this work, we present X-VC, a zero-shot streaming VC system that performs one-step conversion in the latent space of a pretrained neural codec. X-VC uses a dual-conditioning acoustic converter that jointly models source codec latents and frame-level acoustic conditions derived from target reference speech, while injecting utterance-level target speaker information through adaptive normalization. To reduce the mismatch between training and inference, we train the model with generated paired data and a role-assignment strategy that combines standard, reconstruction, and reversed modes. For streaming inference, we further adopt a chunkwise inference scheme with overlap smoothing that is aligned with the segment-based training paradigm of the codec. Experiments on Seed-TTS-Eval show that X-VC achieves the best streaming WER in both English and Chinese, strong speaker similarity in same-language and cross-lingual settings, and substantially lower offline real-time factor than the compared baselines. These results suggest that codec-space one-step conversion is a practical approach for building high-quality low-latency zero-shot VC systems. Our audio samples, code and checkpoints are released at this https URL.

Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2604.12456 [eess.AS]

(or arXiv:2604.12456v3 [eess.AS] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.12456 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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