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In VR interactions with embodied conversational agents, users' emotional intent is often conveyed more by how something is said than by what is said. However, most VR agent pipelines rely on speech-to-text processing, discarding prosodic…

Speech synthesis for poetry is challenging due to specific intonation patterns inherent to poetic speech. In this work, we propose an approach to synthesise poems with almost human like naturalness in order to enable literary scholars to…

Speech-to-speech translation systems today do not adequately support use for dialog purposes. In particular, nuances of speaker intent and stance can be lost due to improper prosody transfer. We present an exploration of what needs to be…

Emotion is essential in spoken communication, yet most existing frameworks in speech emotion modeling rely on predefined categories or low-dimensional continuous attributes, which offer limited expressive capacity. Recent advances in speech…

Expressive speech synthesis requires vibrant prosody and well-timed pauses. We propose an effective strategy to augment a small dataset to train an expressive end-to-end Text-to-Speech model. We merge audios of emotionally congruent text…

It remains a challenge to effectively control the emotion rendering in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Prior studies have primarily focused on learning a global prosodic representation at the utterance level, which strongly correlates with…

Emotions lie on a broad continuum and treating emotions as a discrete number of classes limits the ability of a model to capture the nuances in the continuum. The challenge is how to describe the nuances of emotions and how to enable a…

Neural text-to-speech (TTS) approaches generally require a huge number of high quality speech data, which makes it difficult to obtain such a dataset with extra emotion labels. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for emotional TTS…

The analysis of emotions expressed in text has numerous applications. In contrast to categorical analysis, focused on classifying emotions according to a pre-defined set of common classes, dimensional approaches can offer a more nuanced way…

In our previous work, we introduced CosyVoice, a multilingual speech synthesis model based on supervised discrete speech tokens. By employing progressive semantic decoding with two popular generative models, language models (LMs) and Flow…

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…

Spoken language models (SLMs) have emerged as a unified paradigm for speech understanding and generation, enabling natural human machine interaction. However, while most progress has focused on semantic accuracy and instruction following,…

Emotional information in speech plays a unique role in multimodal perception. However, current Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs), similar to conventional speech emotion recognition (SER) systems, still treat emotion understanding as…

Prosody modeling is important, but still challenging in expressive voice conversion. As prosody is difficult to model, and other factors, e.g., speaker, environment and content, which are entangled with prosody in speech, should be removed…

This paper explores the manipulation of prosodic parameters in Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems to achieve controlled speech generation. By leveraging advanced speech processing techniques, we compare TTS-generated audio with human-recorded…

Expressive human speech generally abounds with rich and flexible speech prosody variations. The speech prosody predictors in existing expressive speech synthesis methods mostly produce deterministic predictions, which are learned by…

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,…

Although text-to-speech (TTS) systems have significantly improved, most TTS systems still have limitations in synthesizing speech with appropriate phrasing. For natural speech synthesis, it is important to synthesize the speech with a…

As voice-based assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant become ubiquitous, users increasingly expect to maintain natural and informative conversations with such systems. However, for an open-domain conversational system to be…

Generating natural speech with a diverse and smooth prosody pattern is a challenging task. Although random sampling with phone-level prosody distribution has been investigated to generate different prosody patterns, the diversity of the…