High-quality and intelligible speech is essential to text-to-speech (TTS)
model training, however, obtaining high-quality data for low-resource languages
is challenging and expensive. Applying speech enhancement on Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR) corpus mitigates the issue by augmenting the training data,
while how the nonlinear speech distortion brought by speech enhancement models
affects TTS training still needs to be investigated. In this paper, we train a
TF-GridNet speech enhancement model and apply it to low-resource datasets that
were collected for the ASR task, then train a discrete unit based TTS model on
the enhanced speech. We use Arabic datasets as an example and show that the
proposed pipeline significantly improves the low-resource TTS system compared
with other baseline methods in terms of ASR WER metric. We also run empirical
analysis on the correlation between speech enhancement and TTS performances.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202