55,828 research outputs found
You Do Not Need More Data: Improving End-To-End Speech Recognition by Text-To-Speech Data Augmentation
Data augmentation is one of the most effective ways to make end-to-end
automatic speech recognition (ASR) perform close to the conventional hybrid
approach, especially when dealing with low-resource tasks. Using recent
advances in speech synthesis (text-to-speech, or TTS), we build our TTS system
on an ASR training database and then extend the data with synthesized speech to
train a recognition model. We argue that, when the training data amount is
relatively low, this approach can allow an end-to-end model to reach hybrid
systems' quality. For an artificial low-to-medium-resource setup, we compare
the proposed augmentation with the semi-supervised learning technique. We also
investigate the influence of vocoder usage on final ASR performance by
comparing Griffin-Lim algorithm with our modified LPCNet. When applied with an
external language model, our approach outperforms a semi-supervised setup for
LibriSpeech test-clean and only 33% worse than a comparable supervised setup.
Our system establishes a competitive result for end-to-end ASR trained on
LibriSpeech train-clean-100 set with WER 4.3% for test-clean and 13.5% for
test-other
Towards Personalized Synthesized Voices for Individuals with Vocal Disabilities: Voice Banking and Reconstruction
When individuals lose the ability to produce their own speech, due to degenerative diseases such as motor neurone disease (MND) or Parkinson’s, they lose not only a functional means of communication but also a display of their individual and group identity. In order to build personalized synthetic voices, attempts have been made to capture the voice before it is lost, using a process known as voice banking. But, for some patients, the speech deterioration frequently coincides or quickly follows diagnosis. Using HMM-based speech synthesis, it is now possible to build personalized synthetic voices with minimal data recordings and even disordered speech. The power of this approach is that it is possible to use the patient’s recordings to adapt existing voice models pre-trained on many speakers. When the speech has begun to deteriorate, the adapted voice model can be further modified in order to compensate for the disordered characteristics found in the patient’s speech. The University of Edinburgh has initiated a project for voice banking and reconstruction based on this speech synthesis technology. At the current stage of the project, more than fifteen patients with MND have already been recorded and five of them have been delivered a reconstructed voice. In this paper, we present an overview of the project as well as subjective assessments of the reconstructed voices and feedback from patients and their families
Speech Development by Imitation
The Double Cone Model (DCM) is a model
of how the brain transforms sensory input to
motor commands through successive stages of
data compression and expansion. We have
tested a subset of the DCM on speech recognition, production and imitation. The experiments show that the DCM is a good candidate
for an artificial speech processing system that
can develop autonomously. We show that the
DCM can learn a repertoire of speech sounds
by listening to speech input. It is also able to
link the individual elements of speech to sequences that can be recognized or reproduced,
thus allowing the system to imitate spoken
language
Audio style transfer
'Style transfer' among images has recently emerged as a very active research
topic, fuelled by the power of convolution neural networks (CNNs), and has
become fast a very popular technology in social media. This paper investigates
the analogous problem in the audio domain: How to transfer the style of a
reference audio signal to a target audio content? We propose a flexible
framework for the task, which uses a sound texture model to extract statistics
characterizing the reference audio style, followed by an optimization-based
audio texture synthesis to modify the target content. In contrast to mainstream
optimization-based visual transfer method, the proposed process is initialized
by the target content instead of random noise and the optimized loss is only
about texture, not structure. These differences proved key for audio style
transfer in our experiments. In order to extract features of interest, we
investigate different architectures, whether pre-trained on other tasks, as
done in image style transfer, or engineered based on the human auditory system.
Experimental results on different types of audio signal confirm the potential
of the proposed approach.Comment: ICASSP 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech
and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Apr 2018, Calgary, France. IEE
Wavenet based low rate speech coding
Traditional parametric coding of speech facilitates low rate but provides
poor reconstruction quality because of the inadequacy of the model used. We
describe how a WaveNet generative speech model can be used to generate high
quality speech from the bit stream of a standard parametric coder operating at
2.4 kb/s. We compare this parametric coder with a waveform coder based on the
same generative model and show that approximating the signal waveform incurs a
large rate penalty. Our experiments confirm the high performance of the WaveNet
based coder and show that the speech produced by the system is able to
additionally perform implicit bandwidth extension and does not significantly
impair recognition of the original speaker for the human listener, even when
that speaker has not been used during the training of the generative model.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
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