Related papers: On granularity of prosodic representations in expr…

This paper proposes an Expressive Speech Synthesis model that utilizes token-level latent prosodic variables in order to capture and control utterance-level attributes, such as character acting voice and speaking style. Current works aim to…

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…

Recent advances in deep learning methods have elevated synthetic speech quality to human level, and the field is now moving towards addressing prosodic variation in synthetic speech.Despite successes in this effort, the state-of-the-art…

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…

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…

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)…

Modern neural text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis can generate speech that is indistinguishable from natural speech. However, the prosody of generated utterances often represents the average prosodic style of the database instead of having wide…

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…

Text-to-Speech synthesis systems are generally evaluated using Mean Opinion Score (MOS) tests, where listeners score samples of synthetic speech on a Likert scale. A major drawback of MOS tests is that they only offer a general measure of…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Large-scale pre-trained language models have been shown to be helpful in improving the naturalness of text-to-speech (TTS) models by enabling them to produce more naturalistic prosodic patterns. However, these models are usually word-level…

Prosody -- the suprasegmental component of speech, including pitch, loudness, and tempo -- carries critical aspects of meaning. However, the relationship between the information conveyed by prosody vs. by the words themselves remains poorly…

The prosody of a spoken word is determined by its surrounding context. In incremental text-to-speech synthesis, where the synthesizer produces an output before it has access to the complete input, the full context is often unknown which can…

Speech synthesis has significantly advanced from statistical methods to deep neural network architectures, leading to various text-to-speech (TTS) models that closely mimic human speech patterns. However, capturing nuances such as emotion…

Recent parallel neural text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis methods are able to generate speech with high fidelity while maintaining high performance. However, these systems often lack control over the output prosody, thus restricting the…

Prosody is essential for speech technology, shaping comprehension, naturalness, and expressiveness. However, current text-to-speech (TTS) systems still struggle to accurately capture human-like prosodic variation, in part because existing…

While generative methods have progressed rapidly in recent years, generating expressive prosody for an utterance remains a challenging task in text-to-speech synthesis. This is particularly true for systems that model prosody explicitly…