Towards General-Purpose Text-Instruction-Guided Voice Conversion

This paper introduces a novel voice conversion (VC) model, guided by text instructions such as "articulate slowly with a deep tone" or "speak in a cheerful boyish voice". Unlike traditional methods that rely on reference utterances to determine the attributes of the converted speech, our model adds versatility and specificity to voice conversion. The proposed VC model is a neural codec language model which processes a sequence of discrete codes, resulting in the code sequence of converted speech. It utilizes text instructions as style prompts to modify the prosody and emotional information of the given speech. In contrast to previous approaches, which often rely on employing separate encoders like prosody and content encoders to handle different aspects of the source speech, our model handles various information of speech in an end-to-end manner. Experiments have demonstrated the impressive capabilities of our model in comprehending instructions and delivering reasonable results.Comment: Accepted to ASRU 202

Deep learning methods in speaker recognition: a review

This paper summarizes the applied deep learning practices in the field of speaker recognition, both verification and identification. Speaker recognition has been a widely used field topic of speech technology. Many research works have been carried out and little progress has been achieved in the past 5-6 years. However, as deep learning techniques do advance in most machine learning fields, the former state-of-the-art methods are getting replaced by them in speaker recognition too. It seems that DL becomes the now state-of-the-art solution for both speaker verification and identification. The standard x-vectors, additional to i-vectors, are used as baseline in most of the novel works. The increasing amount of gathered data opens up the territory to DL, where they are the most effective

Proceedings

Proceedings of the Workshop on Annotation and Exploitation of Parallel Corpora AEPC 2010. Editors: Lars Ahrenberg, Jörg Tiedemann and Martin Volk. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 10 (2010), 98 pages. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15893

Quality Diversity: Harnessing Evolution to Generate a Diversity of High-Performing Solutions

Evolution in nature has designed countless solutions to innumerable interconnected problems, giving birth to the impressive array of complex modern life observed today. Inspired by this success, the practice of evolutionary computation (EC) abstracts evolution artificially as a search operator to find solutions to problems of interest primarily through the adaptive mechanism of survival of the fittest, where stronger candidates are pursued at the expense of weaker ones until a solution of satisfying quality emerges. At the same time, research in open-ended evolution (OEE) draws different lessons from nature, seeking to identify and recreate processes that lead to the type of perpetual innovation and indefinitely increasing complexity observed in natural evolution. New algorithms in EC such as MAP-Elites and Novelty Search with Local Competition harness the toolkit of evolution for a related purpose: finding as many types of good solutions as possible (rather than merely the single best solution). With the field in its infancy, no empirical studies previously existed comparing these so-called quality diversity (QD) algorithms. This dissertation (1) contains the first extensive and methodical effort to compare different approaches to QD (including both existing published approaches as well as some new methods presented for the first time here) and to understand how they operate to help inform better approaches in the future. It also (2) introduces a new technique for encoding neural networks for evolution with indirect encoding that contain multiple sensory or output modalities. Further, it (3) explores the idea that QD can act as an engine of open-ended discovery by introducing an expressive platform called Voxelbuild where QD algorithms continually evolve robots that stack blocks in new ways. A culminating experiment (4) is presented that investigates evolution in Voxelbuild over a very long timescale. This research thus stands to advance the OEE community\u27s desire to create and understand open-ended systems while also laying the groundwork for QD to realize its potential within EC as a means to automatically generate an endless progression of new content in real-world applications

Text-Independent Voice Conversion

This thesis deals with text-independent solutions for voice conversion. It first introduces the use of vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) for voice conversion. The presented variants of VTLN allow for easily changing speaker characteristics by means of a few trainable parameters. Furthermore, it is shown how VTLN can be expressed in time domain strongly reducing the computational costs while keeping a high speech quality. The second text-independent voice conversion paradigm is residual prediction. In particular, two proposed techniques, residual smoothing and the application of unit selection, result in essential improvement of both speech quality and voice similarity. In order to apply the well-studied linear transformation paradigm to text-independent voice conversion, two text-independent speech alignment techniques are introduced. One is based on automatic segmentation and mapping of artificial phonetic classes and the other is a completely data-driven approach with unit selection. The latter achieves a performance very similar to the conventional text-dependent approach in terms of speech quality and similarity. It is also successfully applied to cross-language voice conversion. The investigations of this thesis are based on several corpora of three different languages, i.e., English, Spanish, and German. Results are also presented from the multilingual voice conversion evaluation in the framework of the international speech-to-speech translation project TC-Star