Related papers: Building African Voices

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A typical text-to-speech system converts a language text into a waveform. There exist many English TTS systems that produce mature, natural, and human-like speech synthesizers.…

Recent advances in speech synthesis have enabled many useful applications like audio directions in Google Maps, screen readers, and automated content generation on platforms like TikTok. However, these systems are mostly dominated by voices…

Recent studies have outlined the accessibility challenges faced by blind or visually impaired, and less-literate people, in interacting with social networks, in-spite of facilitating technologies such as monotone text-to-speech (TTS) screen…

In recent years, several text-to-speech systems have been proposed to synthesize natural speech in zero-shot, few-shot, and low-resource scenarios. However, these methods typically require training with data from many different speakers.…

While recent neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems perform remarkably well, they typically require a substantial amount of recordings from the target speaker reading in the desired speaking style. In this work, we present a novel 3-step…

In this work, we take on the challenging task of building a single text-to-speech synthesis system that is capable of generating speech in over 7000 languages, many of which lack sufficient data for traditional TTS development. By…

Speech synthesis technology has witnessed significant advancements in recent years, enabling the creation of natural and expressive synthetic speech. One area of particular interest is the generation of synthetic child speech, which…

The rapid growth of voice assistants powered by large language models (LLM) has highlighted a need for speech instruction data to train these systems. Despite the abundance of speech recognition data, there is a notable scarcity of speech…

This paper proposes a method for selecting training data for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis from dark data. TTS models are typically trained on high-quality speech corpora that cost much time and money for data collection, which makes it…

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…

Neural Text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is a powerful technology that can generate speech using neural networks. One of the most remarkable features of TTS synthesis is its capability to produce speech in the voice of different speakers. This…

In this work, we explore multiple architectures and training procedures for developing a multi-speaker and multi-lingual neural TTS system with the goals of a) improving the quality when the available data in the target language is limited…

Text-to-speech (TTS) systems are being built using end-to-end deep learning approaches. However, these systems require huge amounts of training data. We present our approach to built production quality TTS and perform speaker adaptation in…

Speech technology remains out of reach for most of the over 2300 languages in Africa. We present the first systematic assessment of large-scale synthetic voice corpora for African ASR. We apply a three-step process: LLM-driven text…

Speech synthesis might hold the key to low-resource speech recognition. Data augmentation techniques have become an essential part of modern speech recognition training. Yet, they are simple, naive, and rarely reflect real-world conditions.…

The performance of a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis model depends on various factors, of which the quality of the training data is of utmost importance. Millions of data are collected around the globe for various languages, but resources…

Currently, a common approach in many speech processing tasks is to leverage large scale pre-trained models by fine-tuning them on in-domain data for a particular application. Yet obtaining even a small amount of such data can be…

An unsupervised text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) system learns to generate speech waveforms corresponding to any written sentence in a language by observing: 1) a collection of untranscribed speech waveforms in that language; 2) a collection…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques have achieved remarkable results in various speech processing tasks. Nonetheless, a significant challenge remains in reducing the reliance on vast amounts of speech data for pre-training. This paper…

End-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) has shown great success on large quantities of paired text plus speech data. However, laborious data collection remains difficult for at least 95% of the languages over the world, which hinders the…