6,878 research outputs found
Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis
A text-to-speech synthesis system typically consists of multiple stages, such
as a text analysis frontend, an acoustic model and an audio synthesis module.
Building these components often requires extensive domain expertise and may
contain brittle design choices. In this paper, we present Tacotron, an
end-to-end generative text-to-speech model that synthesizes speech directly
from characters. Given pairs, the model can be trained completely
from scratch with random initialization. We present several key techniques to
make the sequence-to-sequence framework perform well for this challenging task.
Tacotron achieves a 3.82 subjective 5-scale mean opinion score on US English,
outperforming a production parametric system in terms of naturalness. In
addition, since Tacotron generates speech at the frame level, it's
substantially faster than sample-level autoregressive methods.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 2017. v2 changed paper title to be
consistent with our conference submission (no content change other than typo
fixes
FloWaveNet : A Generative Flow for Raw Audio
Most modern text-to-speech architectures use a WaveNet vocoder for
synthesizing high-fidelity waveform audio, but there have been limitations,
such as high inference time, in its practical application due to its ancestral
sampling scheme. The recently suggested Parallel WaveNet and ClariNet have
achieved real-time audio synthesis capability by incorporating inverse
autoregressive flow for parallel sampling. However, these approaches require a
two-stage training pipeline with a well-trained teacher network and can only
produce natural sound by using probability distillation along with auxiliary
loss terms. We propose FloWaveNet, a flow-based generative model for raw audio
synthesis. FloWaveNet requires only a single-stage training procedure and a
single maximum likelihood loss, without any additional auxiliary terms, and it
is inherently parallel due to the characteristics of generative flow. The model
can efficiently sample raw audio in real-time, with clarity comparable to
previous two-stage parallel models. The code and samples for all models,
including our FloWaveNet, are publicly available.Comment: 9 pages, ICML'201
- …