Related papers: Flavored Tacotron: Conditional Learning for Prosod…

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…

Modern sequence to sequence neural TTS systems provide close to natural speech quality. Such systems usually comprise a network converting linguistic/phonetic features sequence to an acoustic features sequence, cascaded with a neural…

Tacotron-based end-to-end speech synthesis has shown remarkable voice quality. However, the rendering of prosody in the synthesized speech remains to be improved, especially for long sentences, where prosodic phrasing errors can occur…

A text-to-speech synthesis system typically consists of multiple stages, such as a text analysis frontend, an acoustic model and an audio synthesis module. Building these components often requires extensive domain expertise and may contain…

Text does not fully specify the spoken form, so text-to-speech models must be able to learn from speech data that vary in ways not explained by the corresponding text. One way to reduce the amount of unexplained variation in training data…

This paper presents a simple yet effective method to achieve prosody transfer from a reference speech signal to synthesized speech. The main idea is to incorporate well-known acoustic correlates of prosody such as pitch and loudness…

Text-to-speech systems recently achieved almost indistinguishable quality from human speech. However, the prosody of those systems is generally flatter than natural speech, producing samples with low expressiveness. Disentanglement of…

This paper describes Tacotron 2, a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text. The system is composed of a recurrent sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network that maps character embeddings to mel-scale…

We propose a novel training strategy for Tacotron-based text-to-speech (TTS) system to improve the expressiveness of speech. One of the key challenges in prosody modeling is the lack of reference that makes explicit modeling difficult. The…

In this paper, we propose a method of speaker adaption with intuitive prosodic features for statistical parametric speech synthesis. The intuitive prosodic features employed in this method include pitch, pitch range, speech rate and energy…

This paper presents an accented text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis framework with limited training data. We study two aspects concerning accent rendering: phonetic (phoneme difference) and prosodic (pitch pattern and phoneme duration)…

Recent advancements in neural end-to-end TTS models have shown high-quality, natural synthesized speech in a conventional sentence-based TTS. However, it is still challenging to reproduce similar high quality when a whole paragraph is…

Prosodic modeling is a core problem in speech synthesis. The key challenge is producing desirable prosody from textual input containing only phonetic information. In this preliminary study, we introduce the concept of "style tokens" in…

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…

This study proposes a segmental-level prosodic probing framework to evaluate neural TTS models' ability to reproduce consonant-induced f0 perturbation, a fine-grained segmental-prosodic effect that reflects local articulatory mechanisms. We…

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…

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…

Prosody is essential for speech technology, shaping comprehension, naturalness, and expressiveness. However, current text-to-speech (TTS) systems still struggle to accurately capture human-like prosodic variation, in part because existing…

Although end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) models such as Tacotron have shown excellent results, they typically require a sizable set of high-quality <text, audio> pairs for training, which are expensive to collect. In this paper, we propose…

For articulatory-to-acoustic mapping, typically only limited parallel training data is available, making it impossible to apply fully end-to-end solutions like Tacotron2. In this paper, we experimented with transfer learning and adaptation…