Related papers: Building African Voices

Incorporating cross-speaker style transfer in text-to-speech (TTS) models is challenging due to the need to disentangle speaker and style information in audio. In low-resource expressive data scenarios, voice conversion (VC) can generate…

The problem of synthetic speech detection has enjoyed considerable attention, with recent methods achieving low error rates across several established benchmarks. However, to what extent can low error rates on academic benchmarks translate…

In recent years, neural network based methods for multi-speaker text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) have made significant progress. However, the current speaker encoder models used in these methods still cannot capture enough speaker…

State of the art (SOTA) neural text to speech (TTS) models can generate natural-sounding synthetic voices. These models are characterized by large memory footprints and substantial number of operations due to the long-standing focus on…

This paper explores the use of TTS synthesized training data for KWS (keyword spotting) task while minimizing development cost and time. Keyword spotting models require a huge amount of training data to be accurate, and obtaining such…

In recent years, Text-To-Speech (TTS) has been used as a data augmentation technique for speech recognition to help complement inadequacies in the training data. Correspondingly, we investigate the use of a multi-speaker TTS system to…

Paralinguistic sounds, like laughter and sighs, are crucial for synthesizing more realistic and engaging speech. However, existing methods typically depend on proprietary datasets, while publicly available resources often suffer from…

This work aims to build a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system for ten lower-resourced Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Sakha, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek. We specifically target the…

This paper proposes visual-text to speech (vTTS), a method for synthesizing speech from visual text (i.e., text as an image). Conventional TTS converts phonemes or characters into discrete symbols and synthesizes a speech waveform from…

This paper introduces BnTTS (Bangla Text-To-Speech), the first framework for Bangla speaker adaptation-based TTS, designed to bridge the gap in Bangla speech synthesis using minimal training data. Building upon the XTTS architecture, our…

High-quality Text-to-Speech (TTS) model training requires extensive and diverse text and speech data. It is challenging to procure such data from real sources due to issues of domain specificity, licensing, and scalability. Large language…

Recent advances in generative language modeling applied to discrete speech tokens presented a new avenue for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. These speech language models (SLMs), similarly to their textual counterparts, are scalable,…

This paper proposes a method for extracting a lightweight subset from a text-to-speech (TTS) corpus ensuring synthetic speech quality. In recent years, methods have been proposed for constructing large-scale TTS corpora by collecting…

Recent state-of-the-art neural text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis models have dramatically improved intelligibility and naturalness of generated speech from text. However, building a good bilingual or code-switched TTS for a particular voice is…

Almost none of the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa have widely available automatic speech recognition systems, and the required data is also only available for a few languages. We have experimented with two techniques which may provide…

This paper introduces RyanSpeech, a new speech corpus for research on automated text-to-speech (TTS) systems. Publicly available TTS corpora are often noisy, recorded with multiple speakers, or lack quality male speech data. In order to…

Spontaneous style speech synthesis, which aims to generate human-like speech, often encounters challenges due to the scarcity of high-quality data and limitations in model capabilities. Recent language model-based TTS systems can be trained…

Modern machine learning models for audio tasks often exhibit superior performance on English and other well-resourced languages, primarily due to the abundance of available training data. This disparity leads to an unfair performance gap…

Recent advances in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) have been largely fueled by massive speech corpora. However, extending coverage to diverse languages with limited resources remains a formidable challenge. This paper introduces Speech…

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)…