Lightning TTS Benchmark Metrics

Definitions for every metric reported on the Performance page. Grouped by category.

Naturalness - higher is better

Overall - Holistic listener rating of how natural the voice sounds end-to-end.
Naturalness - How human-like the voice sounds; penalizes robotic or synthetic quality.
Intonation - Whether pitch rises and falls appropriately for the sentence type (question, statement, exclamation).
Prosody - The broader umbrella of rhythm, stress, and melody, how well the voice “reads” the sentence as a human would.
Pronunciation - Whether individual words are phonetically correct, especially names, loanwords, and domain-specific terms.
Audio Quality - Technical cleanliness of the output; absence of artifacts, distortion, clipping, or background noise.

Overall - Holistic listener rating of how expressive the voice sounds given the context of the sentence.
Paralinguistics - Non-verbal vocal elements like laughter, sighs, or filler sounds (“um”, “uh”) and whether they’re rendered appropriately.
Emotions - How accurately the voice conveys the intended emotional tone (neutral, warm, urgent, etc.).

Boundary Consistency - Whether phrase and sentence boundaries are marked consistently with pauses or pitch shifts, without arbitrary breaks mid-phrase.
Pronunciation Style - Not just correctness, but stylistic choices i.e., formal vs. casual register, regional accent consistency, honorific handling.
Natural Pace - Whether the speaking rate feels comfortable and appropriate for the content type, neither rushed nor dragging.
Pause Placement - Whether silences appear at semantically correct points (after commas, between clauses) rather than mid-word or mid-phrase.
Breathing Naturalness - Whether breath sounds occur at realistic points and with realistic frequency, not absent entirely or inserted randomly.

Mixed direction - WER, CER, Hallucination, and Deletion are lower is better; Pronunciation % is higher is better.

WER (Word Error Rate) - Percentage of words in the transcript that differ from the reference; measures how faithfully the TTS renders the input text.
CER (Character Error Rate) - Like WER but at the character level.
Hallucination - Words or sounds the TTS generates that have no basis in the input text. Insertions, substitutions, or fabricated content.
Deletion - Words from the reference text that the TTS dropped entirely.
Pronunciation % - The proportion of words pronounced correctly out of total words.
Whisper jiwer vs Whisper LLM - Two judging methodologies. jiwer uses raw Whisper-decoded transcripts; LLM-judged uses a follow-on LLM to normalize transcription noise. Both report the same metric family; LLM-judged tends to give lower error rates by reducing false positives from punctuation/casing.

Mean MOS - Mean Opinion Score: average listener rating on a 1–5 scale across the test set; the canonical aggregate quality metric in TTS evaluation.
UTMOS - A predicted MOS from the UTMOS reference model - an automated proxy for subjective quality.
WV-MOS - A predicted MOS from the WavLM-based WV-MOS reference model - another automated proxy commonly reported alongside UTMOS for cross-validation.

TTFB (Time-to-First-Byte) - Wall-clock delay between sending the synthesis request and the first audio byte arriving on the wire. Lower is better for real-time and conversational use cases.
Real-Time Factor (RTF) - RTF = Audio Duration ÷ Processing Time. Values above 1.0 mean the model produces audio faster than playback.