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In neural text-to-speech (TTS), two-stage system or a cascade of separately learned models have shown synthesis quality close to human speech. For example, FastSpeech2 transforms an input text to a mel-spectrogram and then HiFi-GAN…

Neural models are known to be over-parameterized, and recent work has shown that sparse text-to-speech (TTS) models can outperform dense models. Although a plethora of sparse methods has been proposed for other domains, such methods have…

Existing autoregressive large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models have advantages in speech naturalness, but their token-by-token generation mechanism makes it difficult to precisely control the duration of synthesized speech. This becomes a…

Contemporary neural speech synthesis models have indeed demonstrated remarkable proficiency in synthetic speech generation as they have attained a level of quality comparable to that of human-produced speech. Nevertheless, it is important…

End-to-end architectures have been recently proposed for spoken language understanding (SLU) and semantic parsing. Based on a large amount of data, those models learn jointly acoustic and linguistic-sequential features. Such architectures…

Speech-to-text alignment is a critical component of neural textto-speech (TTS) models. Autoregressive TTS models typically use an attention mechanism to learn these alignments on-line. However, these alignments tend to be brittle and often…

Training a high performance end-to-end speech (E2E) processing model requires an enormous amount of labeled speech data, especially in the era of data-centric artificial intelligence. However, labeled speech data are usually scarcer and…

Neural sequence-to-sequence text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) can produce high-quality speech directly from text or simple linguistic features such as phonemes. Unlike traditional pipeline TTS, the neural sequence-to-sequence TTS does not…

Speech-to-speech translation is yet to reach the same level of coverage as text-to-text translation systems. The current speech technology is highly limited in its coverage of over 7000 languages spoken worldwide, leaving more than half of…

We propose a novel deliberation-based approach to end-to-end (E2E) spoken language understanding (SLU), where a streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) model produces the first-pass hypothesis and a second-pass natural language…

Pause insertion, also known as phrase break prediction and phrasing, is an essential part of TTS systems because proper pauses with natural duration significantly enhance the rhythm and intelligibility of synthetic speech. However,…

Voice Assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant typically use a two-stage Spoken Language Understanding pipeline; first, an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) component to process customer speech and generate text transcriptions,…

Vocoders received renewed attention as main components in statistical parametric text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis and speech transformation systems. Even though there are vocoding techniques give almost accepted synthesized speech, their high…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a core task in most human-machine interaction systems. With the emergence of smart homes, smart phones and smart speakers, SLU has become a key technology for the industry. In a classical SLU approach,…

Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) has witnessed rapid progress in recent years, where neural methods became capable of producing audios with high naturalness. However, these efforts still suffer from two types of latencies: (a) the {\em…

This paper reports on the development of a text-to-speech (TTS) system for Mizo, a low-resource, tonal, and Tibeto-Burman language spoken primarily in the Indian state of Mizoram. The TTS was built with only 5.18 hours of data; however, in…

End-to-end models are an attractive new approach to spoken language understanding (SLU) in which the meaning of an utterance is inferred directly from the raw audio without employing the standard pipeline composed of a separately trained…

Incremental text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis generates utterances in small linguistic units for the sake of real-time and low-latency applications. We previously proposed an incremental TTS method that leverages a large pre-trained language…

End-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is a method that directly converts input text to output acoustic features using a single network. A recent advance of end-to-end TTS is due to a key technique called attention mechanisms, and all…

Automatic speech recognition has recently seen a significant advancement with large foundational models such as Whisper. However, these models often struggle to perform well in low-resource languages, such as Indian languages. This paper…