Related papers: Building African Voices

For many of the 700 million illiterate people around the world, speech recognition technology could provide a bridge to valuable information and services. Yet, those most in need of this technology are often the most underserved by it. In…

Arabic Text-to-Speech (TTS) research has been hindered by the availability of both publicly available training data and accurate Arabic diacritization models. In this paper, we address the limitation by exploring Arabic TTS training on…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages remains constrained by limited labeled data and the lack of systematic guidance on model selection, data scaling, and decoding strategies. Large pre-trained systems such as Whisper,…

Training a text-to-speech (TTS) model requires a large scale text labeled speech corpus, which is troublesome to collect. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning framework for TTS that utilizes a large amount of unlabeled speech…

We present a methodology to train our multi-speaker emotional text-to-speech synthesizer that can express speech for 10 speakers' 7 different emotions. All silences from audio samples are removed prior to learning. This results in fast…

Speech synthesis is one of the challenging tasks to automate by deep learning, also being a low-resource language there are very few attempts at Bangla speech synthesis. Most of the existing works can't work with anything other than simple…

This paper introduces a high-quality open-source text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis dataset for Mongolian, a low-resource language spoken by over 10 million people worldwide. The dataset, named MnTTS, consists of about 8 hours of transcribed…

We propose UnitSpeech, a speaker-adaptive speech synthesis method that fine-tunes a diffusion-based text-to-speech (TTS) model using minimal untranscribed data. To achieve this, we use the self-supervised unit representation as a pseudo…

This paper introduces three self-contained data augmentation methods for low-resource Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Our techniques first generate novel text--using gloss-based replacement, random replacement, or an LLM-based…

Traditional vocoder-based statistical parametric speech synthesis can be advantageous in applications that require low computational complexity. Recent neural vocoders, which can produce high naturalness, still cannot fulfill the…

In this paper, we explore the possibility of speech synthesis from low quality found data using only limited number of samples of target speaker. We try to extract only the speaker embedding from found data of target speaker unlike previous…

We present MunTTS, an end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) system specifically for Mundari, a low-resource Indian language of the Austo-Asiatic family. Our work addresses the gap in linguistic technology for underrepresented languages by…

We address the problem of cross-speaker style transfer for text-to-speech (TTS) using data augmentation via voice conversion. We assume to have a corpus of neutral non-expressive data from a target speaker and supporting conversational…

Personalizing a speech synthesis system is a highly desired application, where the system can generate speech with the user's voice with rare enrolled recordings. There are two main approaches to build such a system in recent works: speaker…

Most existing text-to-speech (TTS) systems either synthesize speech sentence by sentence and stitch the results together, or drive synthesis from plain-text dialogues alone. Both approaches leave models with little understanding of global…

Although end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) models such as Tacotron have shown excellent results, they typically require a sizable set of high-quality <text, audio> pairs for training, which are expensive to collect. In this paper, we propose…

The zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) method, based on speaker embeddings extracted from reference speech using self-supervised learning (SSL) speech representations, can reproduce speaker characteristics very accurately. However, this…

The success of large language models has driven interest in developing similar speech processing capabilities. However, a key challenge is the scarcity of high-quality spontaneous speech data, as most existing datasets contain scripted…

We introduce the first unsupervised speech synthesis system based on a simple, yet effective recipe. The framework leverages recent work in unsupervised speech recognition as well as existing neural-based speech synthesis. Using only…

Recently, deep learning-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems have achieved high-quality speech synthesis results. Recurrent neural networks have become a standard modeling technique for sequential data in TTS systems and are widely used.…