Related papers: Speech BERT Embedding For Improving Prosody in Neu…

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…

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…

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…

Prosody contains rich information beyond the literal meaning of words, which is crucial for the intelligibility of speech. Current models still fall short in phrasing and intonation; they not only miss or misplace breaks when synthesizing…

Pause insertion, also known as phrase break prediction and phrasing, is an essential part of TTS systems because proper pauses with natural duration significantly enhance the rhythm and intelligibility of synthetic speech. However,…

Speaker embedding is an important front-end module to explore discriminative speaker features for many speech applications where speaker information is needed. Current SOTA backbone networks for speaker embedding are designed to aggregate…

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…

Prosody modeling is an essential component in modern text-to-speech (TTS) frameworks. By explicitly providing prosody features to the TTS model, the style of synthesized utterances can thus be controlled. However, predicting natural and…

Intonations play an important role in delivering the intention of a speaker. However, current end-to-end TTS systems often fail to model proper intonations. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel, intuitive method to synthesize…

With the popularity of deep neural network, speech synthesis task has achieved significant improvements based on the end-to-end encoder-decoder framework in the recent days. More and more applications relying on speech synthesis technology…

This paper proposes a model for automatic prosodic label annotation, where the predicted labels can be used for training a prosody-controllable text-to-speech model. The proposed model utilizes not only rich acoustic features extracted by a…

Pre-trained language models such as BERT have become a more common choice of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Research in word representation shows that isotropic embeddings can significantly improve performance on downstream tasks.…

Expressive text-to-speech (TTS) aims to synthesize different speaking style speech according to human's demands. Nowadays, there are two common ways to control speaking styles: (1) Pre-defining a group of speaking style and using…

Prosody conveys rich emotional and semantic information of the speech signal as well as individual idiosyncrasies. We propose a stand-alone model that maps text-to-prosodic features such as F0 and energy and can be used in downstream tasks…

Large pre-trained sentence encoders like BERT start a new chapter in natural language processing. A common practice to apply pre-trained BERT to sequence classification tasks (e.g., classification of sentences or sentence pairs) is by…

With the rapid advancement in deep generative models, recent neural Text-To-Speech(TTS) models have succeeded in synthesizing human-like speech. There have been some efforts to generate speech with various prosody beyond monotonous prosody…

Text to speech (TTS), or speech synthesis, which aims to synthesize intelligible and natural speech given text, is a hot research topic in speech, language, and machine learning communities and has broad applications in the industry. As the…

We present a novel approach to end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) that utilizes pre-trained masked language models (LMs) to facilitate the extraction of linguistic information. The proposed models, BERT-CTC and BECTRA, are…

In this paper, we present CopyCat2 (CC2), a novel model capable of: a) synthesizing speech with different speaker identities, b) generating speech with expressive and contextually appropriate prosody, and c) transferring prosody at…