BlueMagpie-TTS: A Token-Efficient Tokenizer, Language Model, and TTS for Taiwanese-Accent Code-Switching Speech
Off-the-shelf TTS systems are poorly adapted to Taiwanese Mandarin. Their accent defaults to other Mandarin variants, their tokenizers over-segment common Taiwanese text, and their pronunciation degrades at code-switching boundaries where Chinese and English alternate within one utterance. These problems share one root: the text side lacks adaptation to the Taiwanese context. We address the text side from the bottom up. PangolinTokenizer, a byte-level BPE tokenizer trained on Taiwan-context data, reaches the lowest token rate (0.485 tokens/character) with the smallest vocabulary among nine tok
