Related papers: Building African Voices

Speech technology is becoming ever more ubiquitous with the advance of speech enabled devices and services. The use of speech synthesis in Augmentative and Alternative Communication tools, has facilitated inclusion of individuals with…

We introduce a text-to-speech (TTS) model called BASE TTS, which stands for $\textbf{B}$ig $\textbf{A}$daptive $\textbf{S}$treamable TTS with $\textbf{E}$mergent abilities. BASE TTS is the largest TTS model to-date, trained on 100K hours of…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have transformed human-computer interaction; however, low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both research and practical applications. This study…

Current synthetic speech detection (SSD) methods perform well on certain datasets but still face issues of robustness and interpretability. A possible reason is that these methods do not analyze the deficiencies of synthetic speech. In this…

This paper reports on the semi-supervised development of acoustic and language models for under-resourced, code-switched speech in five South African languages. Two approaches are considered. The first constructs four separate bilingual…

The mapping of text to speech (TTS) is non-deterministic, letters may be pronounced differently based on context, or phonemes can vary depending on various physiological and stylistic factors like gender, age, accent, emotions, etc. Neural…

There has been a significant progress in Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis technology in recent years, thanks to the advancement in neural generative modeling. However, existing methods on any-speaker adaptive TTS have achieved unsatisfactory…

Voice conversion (VC) and text-to-speech (TTS) are two tasks that share a similar objective, generating speech with a target voice. However, they are usually developed independently under vastly different frameworks. In this paper, we…

This paper presents a novel framework to build a voice conversion (VC) system by learning from a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system, that is called TTS-VC transfer learning. We first develop a multi-speaker speech synthesis system with…

In this work we present our expert system of Automatic reading or speech synthesis based on a text written in Standard Arabic, our work is carried out in two great stages: the creation of the sound data base, and the transformation of the…

Although many Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have been developed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA), few studies have focused on dialect-specific implementations, particularly for low-resource Arabic…

This paper explores multi-modal controllable Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) where the voice can be generated from face image, and the characteristics of output speech (e.g., pace, noise level, distance, tone, place) can be controllable with…

One of the challenges in developing a high quality custom keyword spotting (KWS) model is the lengthy and expensive process of collecting training data covering a wide range of languages, phrases and speaking styles. We introduce Synth4Kws…

We present a multispeaker, multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis model based on Tacotron that is able to produce high quality speech in multiple languages. Moreover, the model is able to transfer voices across languages, e.g.…

Building automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is a challenging task, especially for under-resourced languages that need to construct corpora nearly from scratch and lack sufficient training data. It has emerged that several African…

In this paper, we propose three methods for generating synthetic samples to train and evaluate multimodal large language models capable of processing both text and speech inputs. Addressing the scarcity of samples containing both…

Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) has witnessed rapid progress in recent years, where neural methods became capable of producing audios with high naturalness. However, these efforts still suffer from two types of latencies: (a) the {\em…

Learning-based Text To Speech systems have the potential to generalize from one speaker to the next and thus require a relatively short sample of any new voice. However, this promise is currently largely unrealized. We present a method that…

We investigate a novel cross-lingual multi-speaker text-to-speech synthesis approach for generating high-quality native or accented speech for native/foreign seen/unseen speakers in English and Mandarin. The system consists of three…

While state-of-the-art Text-to-Speech systems can generate natural speech of very high quality at sentence level, they still meet great challenges in speech generation for paragraph / long-form reading. Such deficiencies are due to i)…