Related papers: Improving Prosody Modelling with Cross-Utterance B…
Modern neural text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis can generate speech that is indistinguishable from natural speech. However, the prosody of generated utterances often represents the average prosodic style of the database instead of having wide…
This paper proposes Transducers with Pronunciation-aware Embeddings (PET). Unlike conventional Transducers where the decoder embeddings for different tokens are trained independently, the PET model's decoder embedding incorporates shared…
The prosody of a spoken utterance, including features like stress, intonation and rhythm, can significantly affect the underlying semantics, and as a consequence can also affect its textual translation. Nevertheless, prosody is rarely…
Expressive text-to-speech (TTS) has become a hot research topic recently, mainly focusing on modeling prosody in speech. Prosody modeling has several challenges: 1) the extracted pitch used in previous prosody modeling works have inevitable…
Recent advances in End-to-End (E2E) Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) have been primarily due to effective pretraining of speech representations. One such pretraining paradigm is the distillation of semantic knowledge from…
The end-to-end TTS, which can predict speech directly from a given sequence of graphemes or phonemes, has shown improved performance over the conventional TTS. However, its predicting capability is still limited by the acoustic/phonetic…
Recent neural speech synthesis systems have gradually focused on the control of prosody to improve the quality of synthesized speech, but they rarely consider the variability of prosody and the correlation between prosody and semantics…
Speech synthesis systems powered by neural networks hold promise for multimedia production, but frequently face issues with producing expressive speech and seamless editing. In response, we present the Cross-Utterance Conditioned…
Pre-trained transformer models shine in many natural language processing tasks and therefore are expected to bear the representation of the input sentence or text meaning. These sentence-level embeddings are also important in…
We propose a novel causal prosody mediation framework for expressive text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Our approach augments the FastSpeech2 architecture with explicit emotion conditioning and introduces counterfactual training objectives to…
Pre-trained contextual representations like BERT have achieved great success in natural language processing. However, the sentence embeddings from the pre-trained language models without fine-tuning have been found to poorly capture…
Neural sequence-to-sequence text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), such as Tacotron-2, transforms text into high-quality speech. However, generating speech with natural prosody still remains a challenge. Yasuda et. al. show that unlike natural…
This work introduces TTS-Transducer - a novel architecture for text-to-speech, leveraging the strengths of audio codec models and neural transducers. Transducers, renowned for their superior quality and robustness in speech recognition, are…
The end-to-end speech synthesis model can directly take an utterance as reference audio, and generate speech from the text with prosody and speaker characteristics similar to the reference audio. However, an appropriate acoustic embedding…
In a typical voice conversion system, prior works utilize various acoustic features (e.g., the pitch, voiced/unvoiced flag, aperiodicity) of the source speech to control the prosody of generated waveform. However, the prosody is related…
We present a multi-speaker Japanese audiobook text-to-speech (TTS) system that leverages multimodal context information of preceding acoustic context and bilateral textual context to improve the prosody of synthetic speech. Previous work…
Some recent models for Text-to-Speech synthesis aim to transfer the prosody of a reference utterance to the generated target synthetic speech. This is done by using a learned embedding of the reference utterance, which is used to condition…
This paper presents a method for end-to-end cross-lingual text-to-speech (TTS) which aims to preserve the target language's pronunciation regardless of the original speaker's language. The model used is based on a non-attentive Tacotron…
This paper investigates four types of cross-utterance speech contexts modeling approaches for streaming and non-streaming Conformer-Transformer (C-T) ASR systems: i) input audio feature concatenation; ii) cross-utterance Encoder embedding…
It is challenging to extract semantic meanings directly from audio signals in spoken language understanding (SLU), due to the lack of textual information. Popular end-to-end (E2E) SLU models utilize sequence-to-sequence automatic speech…