Related papers: Computational Narrative Understanding for Expressi…

Controllable TTS models with natural language prompts often lack the ability for fine-grained control and face a scarcity of high-quality data. We propose a two-stage style-controllable TTS system with language models, utilizing a quantized…

Current speech language models exceed the size and latency constraints of many deployment environments. We build compact, expressive speech generation models through layer-aligned distillation, matching hidden states, attention maps, and…

Expressive speech synthesis, like audiobook synthesis, is still challenging for style representation learning and prediction. Deriving from reference audio or predicting style tags from text requires a huge amount of labeled data, which is…

In this work, we present DiffVoice, a novel text-to-speech model based on latent diffusion. We propose to first encode speech signals into a phoneme-rate latent representation with a variational autoencoder enhanced by adversarial training,…

The goal of this work is zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis, with speaking styles and voices learnt from facial characteristics. Inspired by the natural fact that people can imagine the voice of someone when they look at his or her face, we…

This paper explores multi-modal controllable Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) where the voice can be generated from face image, and the characteristics of output speech (e.g., pace, noise level, distance, tone, place) can be controllable with…

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…

Novel text-to-speech systems can generate entirely new voices that were not seen during training. However, it remains a difficult task to efficiently create personalized voices from a high-dimensional speaker space. In this work, we use…

Recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems trained on reading or acted corpora have achieved near human-level naturalness. The diversity of human speech, however, often goes beyond the coverage of these corpora. We believe the ability to handle…

Recent advances in text-to-speech have significantly improved the expressiveness of synthetic speech. However, a major challenge remains in generating speech that captures the diverse styles exhibited by professional narrators in audiobooks…

An audiobook can dramatically improve a work of literature's accessibility and improve reader engagement. However, audiobooks can take hundreds of hours of human effort to create, edit, and publish. In this work, we present a system that…

End-to-end neural TTS has achieved superior performance on reading style speech synthesis. However, it's still a challenge to build a high-quality conversational TTS due to the limitations of the corpus and modeling capability. This study…

We propose PromptTTS++, a prompt-based text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system that allows control over speaker identity using natural language descriptions. To control speaker identity within the prompt-based TTS framework, we introduce the…

A Prompt-based Text-To-Speech model allows a user to control different aspects of speech, such as speaking rate and perceived gender, through natural language instruction. Although user-friendly, such approaches are on one hand constrained:…

In this paper, we introduce a novel Face-to-Face spoken dialogue model. It processes audio-visual speech from user input and generates audio-visual speech as the response, marking the initial step towards creating an avatar chatbot system…

Despite rapid progress in text-to-speech (TTS), open-source systems still lack truly instruction-following, fine-grained control over core speech attributes (e.g., pitch, speaking rate, age, emotion, and style). We present VoiceSculptor, an…

Conversational AI has made significant progress, yet generating expressive and controllable text-to-speech (TTS) remains challenging. Specifically, controlling fine-grained voice styles and emotions is notoriously difficult and typically…

While current emotional Text-to-Speech (TTS) models have successfully controlled verbal prosody, they often ignore non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), which are essential for authentic human emotion. Although some non-verbal datasets have…

We aim to characterize how different speakers contribute to the perceived output quality of multi-speaker Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis. We automatically rate the quality of TTS using a neural network (NN) trained on human mean opinion…

As recent text-to-speech (TTS) systems have been rapidly improved in speech quality and generation speed, many researchers now focus on a more challenging issue: expressive TTS. To control speaking styles, existing expressive TTS models use…