Abstract
We present SALAD, a zero-shot TTS autoregressive model operating over continuous speech representations. SALAD utilizes a per-token diffusion process to refine and predict continuous representations for the next time step. We compare our approach against a discrete variant of SALAD as well as publicly available zero-shot TTS systems, and conduct a comprehensive analysis of discrete versus continuous modeling techniques. Our results show that SALAD achieves superior intelligibility while matching the speech quality and speaker similarity of ground-truth audio.