  Automatic Speech Understanding (ASU) leverages the power of deep learning
models for accurate interpretation of human speech, leading to a wide range of
speech applications that enrich the human experience. However, training a
robust ASU model requires the curation of a large number of speech samples,
creating risks for privacy breaches. In this work, we investigate using
foundation models to assist privacy-enhancing speech computing. Unlike
conventional works focusing primarily on data perturbation or distributed
algorithms, our work studies the possibilities of using pre-trained generative
models to synthesize speech content as training data with just label guidance.
We show that zero-shot learning with training label-guided synthetic speech
content remains a challenging task. On the other hand, our results demonstrate
that the model trained with synthetic speech samples provides an effective
initialization point for low-resource ASU training. This result reveals the
potential to enhance privacy by reducing user data collection but using
label-guided synthetic speech content.
