Related papers: Knowing What to Stress: A Discourse-Conditioned Te…

The goal of expressive Text-to-speech (TTS) is to synthesize natural speech with desired content, prosody, emotion, or timbre, in high expressiveness. Most of previous studies attempt to generate speech from given labels of styles and…

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)…

This study aims at designing an environment-aware text-to-speech (TTS) system that can generate speech to suit specific acoustic environments. It is also motivated by the desire to leverage massive data of speech audio from heterogeneous…

In long-text speech synthesis, current approaches typically convert text to speech at the sentence-level and concatenate the results to form pseudo-paragraph-level speech. These methods overlook the contextual coherence of paragraphs,…

Accent plays a significant role in speech communication, influencing one's capability to understand as well as conveying a person's identity. This paper introduces a novel and efficient framework for accented Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis…

We introduce a new task, Contextual Text Style Transfer - translating a sentence into a desired style with its surrounding context taken into account. This brings two key challenges to existing style transfer approaches: ($i$) how to…

Conversational Text-to-Speech (CTTS) aims to accurately express an utterance with the appropriate style within a conversational setting, which attracts more attention nowadays. While recognizing the significance of the CTTS task, prior…

Many recently published Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems produce audio close to real speech. However, TTS evaluation needs to be revisited to make sense of the results obtained with the new architectures, approaches and datasets. We propose…

Sentence stress refers to emphasis on words within a spoken utterance to highlight or contrast an idea. It is often used to imply an underlying intention not explicitly stated. Recent speech-aware language models (SLMs) have enabled direct…

Recent studies have introduced end-to-end TTS, which integrates the production of context and acoustic features in statistical parametric speech synthesis. As a result, a single neural network replaced laborious feature engineering with…

Evaluation of Text to Speech (TTS) systems is challenging and resource-intensive. Subjective metrics such as Mean Opinion Score (MOS) are not easily comparable between works. Objective metrics are frequently used, but rarely validated…

Comparing with traditional text-to-speech (TTS) systems, conversational TTS systems are required to synthesize speeches with proper speaking style confirming to the conversational context. However, state-of-the-art context modeling methods…

Current Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems typically use separate models for speech-prompted and text-prompted timbre control. While unifying both control signals into a single model is desirable, the challenge of cross-modal alignment often…

State-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) systems realize high naturalness in monolingual environments, synthesizing speech with correct multilingual accents (especially for Indic languages) and context-relevant emotions still poses difficulty…

With rapid globalization, the need to build inclusive and representative speech technology cannot be overstated. Accent is an important aspect of speech that needs to be taken into consideration while building inclusive speech synthesizers.…

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…

Recent studies have outlined the accessibility challenges faced by blind or visually impaired, and less-literate people, in interacting with social networks, in-spite of facilitating technologies such as monotone text-to-speech (TTS) screen…

Spoken language conveys meaning not only through words but also through intonation, emotion, and emphasis. Sentence stress, the emphasis placed on specific words within a sentence, is crucial for conveying speaker intent and has been…

To further improve the speaking styles of synthesized speeches, current text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis systems commonly employ reference speeches to stylize their outputs instead of just the input texts. These reference speeches are…

In modern speech synthesis, paralinguistic information--such as a speaker's vocal timbre, emotional state, and dynamic prosody--plays a critical role in conveying nuance beyond mere semantics. Traditional Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems rely…