VoiceNet: Fine-Grained Voice Understanding Beyond Emotion at Scale

Abstract

Expressive speech synthesis has outpaced expressive speech perception: systems now render fine-grained vocal performances that no public benchmark can score. Most benchmarks for this inverse problem stop at six to nine basic emotion categories, largely on acted speech. This paper introduces VoiceNet, a human-annotated representation-level benchmark for voice performance understanding on permissively-licensed in-the-wild speech. VoiceNet has two subsets: VoiceNet-Emo applies a 40-emotion taxonomy with three expert ratings per item, and VoiceNet-Ext, a preliminary subset, scores 57 talking-style attributes including speaking rate, vocal tension, breathiness, and register. The paper also releases Emolia, an emotion-annotated version of the Emilia corpus, with a curated rebalanced subset enriched by dense MOSS-Audio Thinking annotations. Two voice-text contrastive baselines train on this data: a 110M-parameter VoiceCLAP-Small for fast large-scale data filtering and a 7B VoiceCLAP-Large for state-of-the-art performance. Both outperform existing CLAP baselines, which sit near chance on VoiceNet-Emo. On VoiceNet-Emo, VoiceCLAP-Large aligns more closely with the aggregate expert consensus than individual experts agree with one another: a comparison against the majority label rather than evidence of surpassing human emotion perception. All systems evaluated here are voice-text embedding models: VoiceNet scores representation-level attribute recognition and retrieval, not end-to-end spoken-dialogue behaviour. Clustering and filtering uncurated speech corpora into subsets that span diverse talking styles and emotions remains an open challenge; VoiceCLAP embeddings offer a promising tool for this task. VoiceNet, Emolia, and VoiceCLAP are publicly available for research use.