English

The Third VoicePrivacy Challenge: Preserving Emotional Expressiveness and Linguistic Content in Voice Anonymization

Computation and Language 2026-01-21 v1 Sound Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

We present results and analyses from the third VoicePrivacy Challenge held in 2024, which focuses on advancing voice anonymization technologies. The task was to develop a voice anonymization system for speech data that conceals a speaker's voice identity while preserving linguistic content and emotional state. We provide a systematic overview of the challenge framework, including detailed descriptions of the anonymization task and datasets used for both system development and evaluation. We outline the attack model and objective evaluation metrics for assessing privacy protection (concealing speaker voice identity) and utility (content and emotional state preservation). We describe six baseline anonymization systems and summarize the innovative approaches developed by challenge participants. Finally, we provide key insights and observations to guide the design of future VoicePrivacy challenges and identify promising directions for voice anonymization research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.11846,
  title  = {The Third VoicePrivacy Challenge: Preserving Emotional Expressiveness and Linguistic Content in Voice Anonymization},
  author = {Natalia Tomashenko and Xiaoxiao Miao and Pierre Champion and Sarina Meyer and Michele Panariello and Xin Wang and Nicholas Evans and Emmanuel Vincent and Junichi Yamagishi and Massimiliano Todisco},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.11846},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

under review