Ten years of WaveNet: Google researcher traces speech synthesis from raw waveforms to multimodal LLMs
heiga_zen · x · 2026-09-09
Google speech researcher Heiga Zen marks the 10th anniversary of WaveNet with a retrospective on a decade of speech synthesis.
- WaveNet (2016): shattered the concatenative/statistical-parametric paradigm by directly generating raw audio waveforms
- End-to-end era: encoder-decoder models like Tacotron generated acoustic features from text, while text-to-waveform models like VITS and NaturalSpeech removed intermediate features entirely
- LLM convergence: AudioLM with SoundStream and VALL-E tokenized audio into the LLM framework, culminating in today's multimodal speech generation
A firsthand technical history from someone who lived it — equal parts tutorial and industry lore.
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