Related papers: Bridging the Gap: Converting Read Text to Conversa…

Deep neural network based speech enhancement approaches aim to learn a noisy-to-clean transformation using a supervised learning paradigm. However, such a trained-well transformation is vulnerable to unseen noises that are not included in…

Embodied agents, in the form of virtual agents or social robots, are rapidly becoming more widespread. In human-human interactions, humans use nonverbal behaviours to convey their attitudes, feelings, and intentions. Therefore, this…

Naturally introduced perturbations in audio signal, caused by emotional and physical states of the speaker, can significantly degrade the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose a front-end based…

Prosodic boundaries in speech are of great relevance to both speech synthesis and audio annotation. In this paper, we apply the wav2vec 2.0 framework to the task of detecting these boundaries in speech signal, using only acoustic…

Despite the growing interest in unsupervised learning, extracting meaningful knowledge from unlabelled audio remains an open challenge. To take a step in this direction, we recently proposed a problem-agnostic speech encoder (PASE), that…

Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has gained popularity due to advancements in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, untrusted third-party platforms have raised concerns about AI security, particularly in backdoor attacks. Recent…

In this paper, we investigate the use of prediction-adaptation-correction recurrent neural networks (PAC-RNNs) for low-resource speech recognition. A PAC-RNN is comprised of a pair of neural networks in which a {\it correction} network uses…

Lip-to-speech synthesis aims to generate speech audio directly from silent facial video by reconstructing linguistic content from lip movements, providing valuable applications in situations where audio signals are unavailable or degraded.…

Factorizing speech as disentangled speech representations is vital to achieve highly controllable style transfer in voice conversion (VC). Conventional speech representation learning methods in VC only factorize speech as speaker and…

Prosody is essential for speech technology, shaping comprehension, naturalness, and expressiveness. However, current text-to-speech (TTS) systems still struggle to accurately capture human-like prosodic variation, in part because existing…

Voice conversion for highly expressive speech is challenging. Current approaches struggle with the balancing between speaker similarity, intelligibility and expressiveness. To address this problem, we propose Expressive-VC, a novel…

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,…

Conversational agents have traditionally been developed for either task-oriented dialogue (TOD) or open-ended chitchat, with limited progress in unifying the two. Yet, real-world conversations naturally involve fluid transitions between…

Audio codecs are typically transform-domain based and efficiently code stationary audio signals, but they struggle with speech and signals containing dense transient events such as applause. Specifically, with these two classes of signals…

In a conversational context, a user expresses her multi-faceted information need as a sequence of natural-language questions, i.e., utterances. Starting from a given topic, the conversation evolves through user utterances and system…

This work adapts two recent architectures of generative models and evaluates their effectiveness for the conversion of whispered speech to normal speech. We incorporate the normal target speech into the training criterion of…

Text-to-speech models trained on large-scale datasets have demonstrated impressive in-context learning capabilities and naturalness. However, control of speaker identity and style in these models typically requires conditioning on reference…

Text-to-speech (TTS) systems offer the opportunity to compensate for a hearing loss at the source rather than correcting for it at the receiving end. This removes limitations such as time constraints for algorithms that amplify a sound in a…

The text-based speech editor allows the editing of speech through intuitive cutting, copying, and pasting operations to speed up the process of editing speech. However, the major drawback of current systems is that edited speech often…

Generative adversarial networks have seen rapid development in recent years and have led to remarkable improvements in generative modelling of images. However, their application in the audio domain has received limited attention, and…