Related papers: Learning utterance-level representations through t…
The prosodic aspects of speech signals produced by current text-to-speech systems are typically averaged over training material, and as such lack the variety and liveliness found in natural speech. To avoid monotony and averaged prosody…
Recent work has explored sequence-to-sequence latent variable models for expressive speech synthesis (supporting control and transfer of prosody and style), but has not presented a coherent framework for understanding the trade-offs between…
This paper presents a novel design of neural network system for fine-grained style modeling, transfer and prediction in expressive text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Fine-grained modeling is realized by extracting style embeddings from the…
An ability to model a generative process and learn a latent representation for speech in an unsupervised fashion will be crucial to process vast quantities of unlabelled speech data. Recently, deep probabilistic generative models such as…
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…
Expressive text-to-speech (TTS) has become a hot research topic recently, mainly focusing on modeling prosody in speech. Prosody modeling has several challenges: 1) the extracted pitch used in previous prosody modeling works have inevitable…
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…
We propose spoken sentence embeddings which capture both acoustic and linguistic content. While existing works operate at the character, phoneme, or word level, our method learns long-term dependencies by modeling speech at the sentence…
We propose a novel high-fidelity expressive speech synthesis model, UniTTS, that learns and controls overlapping style attributes avoiding interference. UniTTS represents multiple style attributes in a single unified embedding space by the…
Accent plays a significant role in speech communication, influencing one's capability to understand as well as conveying a person's identity. This paper introduces a novel and efficient framework for accented Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis…
Neural models have become ubiquitous in automatic speech recognition systems. While neural networks are typically used as acoustic models in more complex systems, recent studies have explored end-to-end speech recognition systems based on…
We address the problem of inferring a speaker's level of certainty based on prosodic information in the speech signal, which has application in speech-based dialogue systems. We show that using phrase-level prosodic features centered around…
Latent representation learned from multi-layered neural networks via hierarchical feature abstraction enables recent success of deep learning. Under the deep learning framework, generalization performance highly depends on the learned…
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…
A large part of the expressive speech synthesis literature focuses on learning prosodic representations of the speech signal which are then modeled by a prior distribution during inference. In this paper, we compare different prior…
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…
We propose prosody embeddings for emotional and expressive speech synthesis networks. The proposed methods introduce temporal structures in the embedding networks, thus enabling fine-grained control of the speaking style of the synthesized…
To simplify the generation process, several text-to-speech (TTS) systems implicitly learn intermediate latent representations instead of relying on predefined features (e.g., mel-spectrogram). However, their generation quality is…
Expressive text-to-speech systems have undergone significant advancements owing to prosody modeling, but conventional methods can still be improved. Traditional approaches have relied on the autoregressive method to predict the quantized…
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…