  Self-supervised learning (SSL) proficiency in speech-related tasks has driven
research into utilizing discrete tokens for speech tasks like recognition and
translation, which offer lower storage requirements and great potential to
employ natural language processing techniques. However, these studies, mainly
single-task focused, faced challenges like overfitting and performance
degradation in speech recognition tasks, often at the cost of sacrificing
performance in multi-task scenarios. This study presents a comprehensive
comparison and optimization of discrete tokens generated by various leading SSL
models in speech recognition and synthesis tasks. We aim to explore the
universality of speech discrete tokens across multiple speech tasks.
Experimental results demonstrate that discrete tokens achieve comparable
results against systems trained on FBank features in speech recognition tasks
and outperform mel-spectrogram features in speech synthesis in subjective and
objective metrics. These findings suggest that universal discrete tokens have
enormous potential in various speech-related tasks. Our work is open-source and
publicly available at https://github.com/k2-fsa/icefall.
