English

SpeedySpeech: Efficient Neural Speech Synthesis

Audio and Speech Processing 2020-08-11 v1 Computation and Language Machine Learning Sound

Abstract

While recent neural sequence-to-sequence models have greatly improved the quality of speech synthesis, there has not been a system capable of fast training, fast inference and high-quality audio synthesis at the same time. We propose a student-teacher network capable of high-quality faster-than-real-time spectrogram synthesis, with low requirements on computational resources and fast training time. We show that self-attention layers are not necessary for generation of high quality audio. We utilize simple convolutional blocks with residual connections in both student and teacher networks and use only a single attention layer in the teacher model. Coupled with a MelGAN vocoder, our model's voice quality was rated significantly higher than Tacotron 2. Our model can be efficiently trained on a single GPU and can run in real time even on a CPU. We provide both our source code and audio samples in our GitHub repository.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.03802,
  title  = {SpeedySpeech: Efficient Neural Speech Synthesis},
  author = {Jan Vainer and Ondřej Dušek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.03802},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures, Interspeech 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:44:08.767Z