EZ-Ar-VC: Robust Arabic Voice Anonymization with Generalization across Dialects and Code-Switching
Injy Hamed, Adarsh Arigala, Rufael Marew, Arjun Gangwar, Atharva Kulkarni, Hanan Aldarmaki, Srinivasan Umesh
Abstract
Voice conversion (VC) models can be used to anonymize speech data while preserving naturalness. Existing models, however, are mainly optimized for English and other high-resource languages, and they fail to generalize well to Arabic due to its distinct phonology. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate existing zero-shot VC systems for Arabic speech, identifying limitations in pronunciation preservation. We then train an Arabic-centric model based on EZ-VC on diverse Arabic speech, and demonstrate strong performance in intelligibility, naturalness, and pronunciation preservation, while maintaining high speaker dissimilarity. Through subjective evaluation, we further demonstrate its robustness to code-switching and cross-dialectal conversion, as well as its generalization to Arabic dialects with limited representation in the training data. Our findings highlight the limitations of zero-shot VC and the importance of target-language adaptation for robust voice anonymization.