Related papers: Automatic Prosody Annotation with Pre-Trained Text…

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…

The field of prosody transfer in speech synthesis systems is rapidly advancing. This research is focused on evaluating learning methods for adapting pre-trained monolingual text-to-speech (TTS) models to multilingual conditions, i.e.,…

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…

Generating speech from a face image is crucial for developing virtual humans capable of interacting using their unique voices, without relying on pre-recorded human speech. In this paper, we propose Face-StyleSpeech, a zero-shot…

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…

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…

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…

Using a text description as prompt to guide the generation of text or images (e.g., GPT-3 or DALLE-2) has drawn wide attention recently. Beyond text and image generation, in this work, we explore the possibility of utilizing text…

Parallel text-to-speech (TTS) models have recently enabled fast and highly-natural speech synthesis. However, they typically require external alignment models, which are not necessarily optimized for the decoder as they are not jointly…

Modern neural TTS systems are capable of generating natural and expressive speech when provided with sufficient amounts of training data. Such systems can be equipped with prosody-control functionality, allowing for more direct shaping of…

End-to-end neural TTS has achieved superior performance on reading style speech synthesis. However, it's still a challenge to build a high-quality conversational TTS due to the limitations of the corpus and modeling capability. This study…

Speech language models refer to language models with speech processing and understanding capabilities. One key desirable capability for speech language models is the ability to capture the intricate interdependency between content and…

In spoken Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems, the choice of the semantic representation describing the users' requests is key to a smooth interaction. Indeed, the system uses this representation to reason over a database and its domain…

Prosodic phrasing is crucial to the naturalness and intelligibility of end-to-end Text-to-Speech (TTS). There exist both linguistic and emotional prosody in natural speech. As the study of prosodic phrasing has been linguistically…

In conversational speech, the acoustic signal provides cues that help listeners disambiguate difficult parses. For automatically parsing spoken utterances, we introduce a model that integrates transcribed text and acoustic-prosodic features…

Recent advances in text-to-speech have made it possible to generate natural-sounding audio from text. However, audiobook narrations involve dramatic vocalizations and intonations by the reader, with greater reliance on emotions, dialogues,…

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…

Many factors influence speech yielding different renditions of a given sentence. Generative models, such as variational autoencoders (VAEs), capture this variability and allow multiple renditions of the same sentence via sampling. The…

State-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) systems have utilized pretrained language models (PLMs) to enhance prosody and create more natural-sounding speech. However, while PLMs have been extensively researched for natural language…

In this paper we introduce a new natural language processing dataset and benchmark for predicting prosodic prominence from written text. To our knowledge this will be the largest publicly available dataset with prosodic labels. We describe…