32,854 research outputs found
A High Quality Text-To-Speech System Composed of Multiple Neural Networks
While neural networks have been employed to handle several different
text-to-speech tasks, ours is the first system to use neural networks
throughout, for both linguistic and acoustic processing. We divide the
text-to-speech task into three subtasks, a linguistic module mapping from text
to a linguistic representation, an acoustic module mapping from the linguistic
representation to speech, and a video module mapping from the linguistic
representation to animated images. The linguistic module employs a
letter-to-sound neural network and a postlexical neural network. The acoustic
module employs a duration neural network and a phonetic neural network. The
visual neural network is employed in parallel to the acoustic module to drive a
talking head. The use of neural networks that can be retrained on the
characteristics of different voices and languages affords our system a degree
of adaptability and naturalness heretofore unavailable.Comment: Source link (9812006.tar.gz) contains: 1 PostScript file (4 pages)
and 3 WAV audio files. If your system does not support Windows WAV files, try
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Neural Speech Synthesis with Transformer Network
Although end-to-end neural text-to-speech (TTS) methods (such as Tacotron2)
are proposed and achieve state-of-the-art performance, they still suffer from
two problems: 1) low efficiency during training and inference; 2) hard to model
long dependency using current recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Inspired by the
success of Transformer network in neural machine translation (NMT), in this
paper, we introduce and adapt the multi-head attention mechanism to replace the
RNN structures and also the original attention mechanism in Tacotron2. With the
help of multi-head self-attention, the hidden states in the encoder and decoder
are constructed in parallel, which improves the training efficiency. Meanwhile,
any two inputs at different times are connected directly by self-attention
mechanism, which solves the long range dependency problem effectively. Using
phoneme sequences as input, our Transformer TTS network generates mel
spectrograms, followed by a WaveNet vocoder to output the final audio results.
Experiments are conducted to test the efficiency and performance of our new
network. For the efficiency, our Transformer TTS network can speed up the
training about 4.25 times faster compared with Tacotron2. For the performance,
rigorous human tests show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art
performance (outperforms Tacotron2 with a gap of 0.048) and is very close to
human quality (4.39 vs 4.44 in MOS)
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