Related papers: Alternate Endings: Improving Prosody for Increment…

Textless speech-to-speech translation systems are rapidly advancing, thanks to the integration of self-supervised learning techniques. However, existing state-of-the-art systems fall short when it comes to capturing and transferring…

Recent work in neural machine translation has demonstrated both the necessity and feasibility of using inter-sentential context -- context from sentences other than those currently being translated. However, while many current methods…

Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…

Modern text-to-speech synthesis pipelines typically involve multiple processing stages, each of which is designed or learnt independently from the rest. In this work, we take on the challenging task of learning to synthesise speech from…

While generative methods have progressed rapidly in recent years, generating expressive prosody for an utterance remains a challenging task in text-to-speech synthesis. This is particularly true for systems that model prosody explicitly…

Identifying whether an utterance is a statement, question, greeting, and so forth is integral to effective automatic understanding of natural dialog. Little is known, however, about how such dialog acts (DAs) can be automatically classified…

Speech-to-text alignment is a critical component of neural text to speech (TTS) models. Autoregressive TTS models typically use an attention mechanism to learn these alignments on-line, while non-autoregressive end to end TTS models rely on…

We introduce a text-to-speech(TTS) framework based on a neural transducer. We use discretized semantic tokens acquired from wav2vec2.0 embeddings, which makes it easy to adopt a neural transducer for the TTS framework enjoying its monotonic…

The goal of this contribution is to use a parametric speech synthesis system for reducing background noise and other interferences from recorded speech signals. In a first step, Hidden Markov Models of the synthesis system are trained. Two…

We propose an end-to-end empathetic dialogue speech synthesis (DSS) model that considers both the linguistic and prosodic contexts of dialogue history. Empathy is the active attempt by humans to get inside the interlocutor in dialogue, and…

Recent advances in generative language modeling applied to discrete speech tokens presented a new avenue for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. These speech language models (SLMs), similarly to their textual counterparts, are scalable,…

This study aims at designing an environment-aware text-to-speech (TTS) system that can generate speech to suit specific acoustic environments. It is also motivated by the desire to leverage massive data of speech audio from heterogeneous…

The front-end is a critical component of English text-to-speech (TTS) systems, responsible for extracting linguistic features that are essential for a text-to-speech model to synthesize speech, such as prosodies and phonemes. The English…

Several recent end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) models enabling single-stage training and parallel sampling have been proposed, but their sample quality does not match that of two-stage TTS systems. In this work, we present a parallel…

We present an extension to the Tacotron speech synthesis architecture that learns a latent embedding space of prosody, derived from a reference acoustic representation containing the desired prosody. We show that conditioning Tacotron on…

We test the hypothesis that discourse predictability influences Hindi syntactic choice. While prior work has shown that a number of factors (e.g., information status, dependency length, and syntactic surprisal) influence Hindi word order…

Text-to-Speech (TTS) has recently seen great progress in synthesizing high-quality speech owing to the rapid development of parallel TTS systems, but producing speech with naturalistic prosodic variations, speaking styles and emotional…

We explore a method for presenting word suggestions for non-visual text input using simultaneous voices. We conduct two perceptual studies and investigate the impact of different presentations of voices on a user's ability to detect which…

This paper demonstrates the potential of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for detecting and classifying prosodic events on words, specifically pitch accents and phrase boundary tones, from frame-based acoustic features. Typical…

Acoustics-to-word models are end-to-end speech recognizers that use words as targets without relying on pronunciation dictionaries or graphemes. These models are notoriously difficult to train due to the lack of linguistic knowledge. It is…