Related papers: Alternate Endings: Improving Prosody for Increment…

This paper advances phrase break prediction (also known as phrasing) in multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) systems. We integrate speaker-specific features by leveraging speaker embeddings to enhance the performance of the phrasing model. We…

We present a novel multi-modal unspoken punctuation prediction system for the English language which combines acoustic and text features. We demonstrate for the first time, that by relying exclusively on synthetic data generated using a…

Machine-generated speech is characterized by its limited or unnatural emotional variation. Current text to speech systems generates speech with either a flat emotion, emotion selected from a predefined set, average variation learned from…

Generating expressive speech with rich and varied prosody continues to be a challenge for Text-to-Speech. Most efforts have focused on sophisticated neural architectures intended to better model the data distribution. Yet, in evaluations it…

Accent plays a significant role in speech communication, influencing one's capability to understand as well as conveying a person's identity. This paper introduces a novel and efficient framework for accented Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis…

We propose prosody embeddings for emotional and expressive speech synthesis networks. The proposed methods introduce temporal structures in the embedding networks, thus enabling fine-grained control of the speaking style of the synthesized…

Streaming TTS that receives streaming text is essential for interactive systems, yet this scheme faces two major challenges: unnatural prosody due to missing lookahead and long-form collapse due to unbounded context. We propose a…

Many recently published Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems produce audio close to real speech. However, TTS evaluation needs to be revisited to make sense of the results obtained with the new architectures, approaches and datasets. We propose…

The prosodic aspects of speech signals produced by current text-to-speech systems are typically averaged over training material, and as such lack the variety and liveliness found in natural speech. To avoid monotony and averaged prosody…

In voice conversion (VC), an approach showing promising results in the latest voice conversion challenge (VCC) 2020 is to first use an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model to transcribe the source speech into the underlying linguistic…

Recent parallel neural text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis methods are able to generate speech with high fidelity while maintaining high performance. However, these systems often lack control over the output prosody, thus restricting the…

With the advent of high-quality speech synthesis, there is a lot of interest in controlling various prosodic attributes of speech. Speaking rate is an essential attribute towards modelling the expressivity of speech. In this work, we…

When human listeners try to guess the spatial position of a speech source, they are influenced by the speaker's production level, regardless of the intensity level reaching their ears. Because the perception of distance is a very difficult…

While state-of-the-art Text-to-Speech systems can generate natural speech of very high quality at sentence level, they still meet great challenges in speech generation for paragraph / long-form reading. Such deficiencies are due to i)…

Some recent studies have demonstrated the feasibility of single-stage neural text-to-speech, which does not need to generate mel-spectrograms but generates the raw waveforms directly from the text. Single-stage text-to-speech often faces…

Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using simple designs in which neural responses to expected and unexpected words are compared in a categorical fashion. However, these designs have been contested as being `prediction…

Prosody is a rich information source in natural language, serving as a marker for phenomena such as contrast. In order to make this information available to downstream tasks, we need a way to detect prosodic events in speech. We propose a…

Parsing spoken dialogue presents challenges that parsing text does not, including a lack of clear sentence boundaries. We know from previous work that prosody helps in parsing single sentences (Tran et al. 2018), but we want to show the…

Accented text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis seeks to generate speech with an accent (L2) as a variant of the standard version (L1). Accented TTS synthesis is challenging as L2 is different from L1 in both in terms of phonetic rendering and…

Prosody transfer is well-studied in the context of expressive speech synthesis. Cross-lingual prosody transfer, however, is challenging and has been under-explored to date. In this paper, we present a novel solution to learn prosody…