Recent development of the HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS)

A statistical parametric approach to speech synthesis based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) has grown in popularity over the last few years. In this approach, spectrum, excitation, and duration of speech are simultaneously modeled by context-dependent HMMs, and speech waveforms are generate from the HMMs themselves. Since December 2002, we have publicly released an open-source software toolkit named “HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS)” to provide a research and development toolkit for statistical parametric speech synthesis. This paper describes recent developments of HTS in detail, as well as future release plans

LSTM Deep Neural Networks Postfiltering for Improving the Quality of Synthetic Voices

Recent developments in speech synthesis have produced systems capable of outcome intelligible speech, but now researchers strive to create models that more accurately mimic human voices. One such development is the incorporation of multiple linguistic styles in various languages and accents. HMM-based Speech Synthesis is of great interest to many researchers, due to its ability to produce sophisticated features with small footprint. Despite such progress, its quality has not yet reached the level of the predominant unit-selection approaches that choose and concatenate recordings of real speech. Recent efforts have been made in the direction of improving these systems. In this paper we present the application of Long-Short Term Memory Deep Neural Networks as a Postfiltering step of HMM-based speech synthesis, in order to obtain closer spectral characteristics to those of natural speech. The results show how HMM-voices could be improved using this approach.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Discriminative multi-stream postfilters based on deep learning for enhancing statistical parametric speech synthesis

Statistical parametric speech synthesis based on Hidden Markov Models has been an important technique for the production of artificial voices, due to its ability to produce results with high intelligibility and sophisticated features such as voice conversion and accent modification with a small footprint, particularly for low-resource languages where deep learning-based techniques remain unexplored. Despite the progress, the quality of the results, mainly based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM) does not reach those of the predominant approaches, based on unit selection of speech segments of deep learning. One of the proposals to improve the quality of HMM-based speech has been incorporating postfiltering stages, which pretend to increase the quality while preserving the advantages of the process. In this paper, we present a new approach to postfiltering synthesized voices with the application of discriminative postfilters, with several long short-term memory (LSTM) deep neural networks. Our motivation stems from modeling specific mapping from synthesized to natural speech on those segments corresponding to voiced or unvoiced sounds, due to the different qualities of those sounds and how HMM-based voices can present distinct degradation on each one. The paper analyses the discriminative postfilters obtained using five voices, evaluated using three objective measures, Mel cepstral distance and subjective tests. The results indicate the advantages of the discriminative postilters in comparison with the HTS voice and the non-discriminative postfilters.Universidad de Costa Rica/[322-B9-105]/UCR/Costa RicaUCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ingeniería::Facultad de Ingeniería::Escuela de Ingeniería Eléctric

Investigating the shortcomings of HMM synthesis

This paper presents the beginnings of a framework for formal testing of the causes of the current limited quality of HMM (Hidden Markov Model) speech synthesis. This framework separates each of the effects of modelling to observe their independent effects on vocoded speech parameters in order to address the issues that are restricting the progression to highly intelligible and natural-sounding speech synthesis. The simulated HMM synthesis conditions are performed on spectral speech parameters and tested via a pairwise listening test, asking listeners to perform a “same or different ” judgement on the quality of the synthesised speech produced between these conditions. These responses are then processed using multidimensional scaling to identify the qualities in modelled speech that listeners are attending to and thus forms the basis of why they are distinguishable from natural speech. The future improvements to be made to the framework will finally be discussed which include the extension to more of the parameters modelled during speech synthesis