Related papers: Prosody Analysis of Audiobooks
While state-of-the-art Text-to-Speech systems can generate natural speech of very high quality at sentence level, they still meet great challenges in speech generation for paragraph / long-form reading. Such deficiencies are due to i)…
Prosody diversity is essential for achieving naturalness and expressiveness in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS). However, frequently used acoustic metrics capture only partial views of prosodic variation and correlate poorly with human…
This paper presents a speech BERT model to extract embedded prosody information in speech segments for improving the prosody of synthesized speech in neural text-to-speech (TTS). As a pre-trained model, it can learn prosody attributes from…
Automatic detection of prominence at the word and syllable-levels is critical for building computer-assisted language learning systems. It has been shown that prosody embeddings learned by the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-speech…
Prosody -- the melody of speech -- conveys critical information often not captured by the words or text of a message. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic approach to quantify how much information is expressed by prosody alone…
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-to-Text Translation (S2TT) systems built from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Text Translation (T2TT) modules face two major limitations: error propagation and the inability to exploit prosodic or other acoustic cues.…
This paper argues that the relationship between lexical identity and prosody -- one well-studied parameter of linguistic variation -- can be characterized using information theory. We predict that languages that use prosody to make lexical…
Evaluation of conversational naturalness is essential for developing human-like speech agents. However, existing speech naturalness predictors are often designed to assess utterances from a single speaker, failing to capture…
Voice conversion as the style transfer task applied to speech, refers to converting one person's speech into a new speech that sounds like another person's. Up to now, there has been a lot of research devoted to better implementation of VC…
Although recent neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems have achieved high-quality speech synthesis, there are cases where a TTS system generates low-quality speech, mainly caused by limited training data or information loss during knowledge…
Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…
Text to Speech (TTS) models can generate natural and high-quality speech, but it is not expressive enough when synthesizing speech with dramatic expressiveness, such as stand-up comedies. Considering comedians have diverse personal speech…
The cloning of a speaker's voice using an untranscribed reference sample is one of the great advances of modern neural text-to-speech (TTS) methods. Approaches for mimicking the prosody of a transcribed reference audio have also been…
Unlike human speakers, typical text-to-speech (TTS) systems are unable to produce multiple distinct renditions of a given sentence. This has previously been addressed by adding explicit external control. In contrast, generative models are…
We present a lightweight adaptable neural TTS system with high quality output. The system is composed of three separate neural network blocks: prosody prediction, acoustic feature prediction and Linear Prediction Coding Net as a neural…
Prosodic phrasing is crucial to the naturalness and intelligibility of end-to-end Text-to-Speech (TTS). There exist both linguistic and emotional prosody in natural speech. As the study of prosodic phrasing has been linguistically…
This research paper presents a comprehensive review-based study on various Text-to-Speech (TTS) technologies. TTS technology is an important aspect of human-computer interaction, enabling machines to convert written text into audible…
Vocal feedback (e.g., `mhm', `yeah', `okay') is an important component of spoken dialogue and is crucial to ensuring common ground in conversational systems. The exact meaning of such feedback is conveyed through both lexical and prosodic…
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…