Emilia: A Large-Scale, Extensive, Multilingual, and Diverse Dataset for Speech Generation
Recent advancements in speech generation have been driven by large-scale training datasets. However, current models struggle to capture the spontaneity and variability inherent in real-world human speech, as they are primarily trained on audio-book datasets limited to formal, read-aloud speaking styles. To address this limitation, we introduce <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Emilia-Pipe</i>, an open-source preprocessing pipeline designed to extract high-quality training data from valuable yet under-explored in-the-wild sources that capture spontaneous human speech in real-world contexts. Using Emilia-Pipe, we construct <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Emilia</i>, which comprises over 101k hours of speech across six languages: English, Chinese, German, French, Japanese, and Korean. Furthermore, we expand Emilia to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Emilia-Large</i>, a dataset exceeding 216k hours, making it one of the largest open-source speech generation resources available. Extensive experiments show that Emilia-trained models produce markedly more spontaneous, human-like speech than those trained on traditional audio-book datasets, while matching their intelligibility. These models better capture diverse speaker timbres and the full spectrum of real-world conversational styles. Our work also highlights the importance of scaling dataset size for advancing speech generation performance and validates the effectiveness of Emilia for both multilingual and crosslingual speech generation tasks.
Authors
- Chaoren Wang
- Yicheng Gu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-7819-5667)
- Pengyuan Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6838-5160)
- Peiyang Shi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0496-171X)
- Kai Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3930-8294)
- Liwei Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0578-1091)
- Y. Q. Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9790-2611)
- Xuyuan Li
- Haorui He (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3429-863X)
- Zengqiang Shang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9225-2138)
- Jiaqi Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8010-9636)
- Yang Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-4163-9490)
- Zhizheng Wu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1192-9857)
- Hua Hua (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4979-924X)
Institutions
- Institute of Acoustics (CN)
- Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CN)
- Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing
- Published
- 2025-01-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1109/taslpro.2025.3612835
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- Speech Recognition and Synthesis
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 2.48