Multispeaker

Multispeaker is a term used to describe systems, devices, or software that involve multiple speakers or voices. It is commonly applied to physical speaker arrays and to speech processing technologies that can generate or recognize more than one voice.

In hardware, multispeaker configurations refer to speaker arrays, surround systems, or distributed loudspeaker networks designed to provide uniform coverage over a space. Design considerations include speaker placement, phase alignment, room acoustics, impedance matching, and synchronized control. Advanced multispeaker setups may use digital signal processing and networked amplifiers to balance levels and manage time delays across channels.

In speech technology, multispeaker text-to-speech and voice cloning systems are capable of producing synthetic speech in multiple distinct voices. Such systems typically use speaker embeddings or conditioning to switch timbre, pitch, and prosody for each speaker. Recent models may be trained on multi-speaker corpora and deploy neural vocoders to deliver natural-sounding output. Challenges include preserving speaker identity, achieving natural prosody across voices, and handling limited data for rare speakers.

Applications include narration for audiobooks, virtual assistants with selectable voices, dubbing, accessibility tools, and entertainment products. Related areas include speaker diarization, speech separation, and voice conversion. See also: text-to-speech, speaker diarization, voice cloning.