Related papers: Word-Level Style Control for Expressive, Non-atten…

In this paper, a text-to-rapping/singing system is introduced, which can be adapted to any speaker's voice. It utilizes a Tacotron-based multispeaker acoustic model trained on read-only speech data and which provides prosody control at the…

Different people have different facial expressions while speaking emotionally. A realistic facial animation system should consider such identity-specific speaking styles and facial idiosyncrasies to achieve high-degree of naturalness and…

Recent advances in text-to-speech have significantly improved the expressiveness of synthetic speech. However, a major challenge remains in generating speech that captures the diverse styles exhibited by professional narrators in audiobooks…

While emotional text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress, most existing research remains limited to utterance-level emotional expression and fails to support word-level control. Achieving word-level expressive control poses…

Although text-to-speech (TTS) systems have significantly improved, most TTS systems still have limitations in synthesizing speech with appropriate phrasing. For natural speech synthesis, it is important to synthesize the speech with a…

Global Style Tokens (GSTs) are a recently-proposed method to learn latent disentangled representations of high-dimensional data. GSTs can be used within Tacotron, a state-of-the-art end-to-end text-to-speech synthesis system, to uncover…

Expressive speech synthesis, like audiobook synthesis, is still challenging for style representation learning and prediction. Deriving from reference audio or predicting style tags from text requires a huge amount of labeled data, which is…

This paper presents a method for controlling the prosody at the phoneme level in an autoregressive attention-based text-to-speech system. Instead of learning latent prosodic features with a variational framework as is commonly done, we…

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…

Neural text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis can generate speech that is indistinguishable from natural speech. However, the synthetic speech often represents the average prosodic style of the database instead of having more versatile prosodic…

In spoken conversations, spontaneous behaviors like filled pause and prolongations always happen. Conversational partner tends to align features of their speech with their interlocutor which is known as entrainment. To produce human-like…

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…

We introduce the task of expressive speech retrieval, where the goal is to retrieve speech utterances spoken in a given style based on a natural language description of that style. While prior work has primarily focused on performing speech…

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…

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…

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)…

As part of the Human-Computer Interaction field, Expressive speech synthesis is a very rich domain as it requires knowledge in areas such as machine learning, signal processing, sociology, psychology. In this Chapter, we will focus mostly…

Current voice conversion (VC) methods can successfully convert timbre of the audio. As modeling source audio's prosody effectively is a challenging task, there are still limitations of transferring source style to the converted speech. This…

This paper proposes a unified model to conduct emotion transfer, control and prediction for sequence-to-sequence based fine-grained emotional speech synthesis. Conventional emotional speech synthesis often needs manual labels or reference…

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…