Recently, end-to-end (E2E) models become a competitive alternative to the conventional hybrid automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. However, they still suffer from speaker mismatch in training and testing condition. In this paper, we use Speech-Transformer (ST) as the study platform to investigate speaker aware training of E2E models. We propose a model called Speaker-Aware Speech-Transformer (SAST), which is a standard ST equipped with a speaker attention module (SAM). The SAM has a static speaker knowledge block (SKB) that is made of i-vectors. At each time step, the encoder output attends to the i-vectors in the block, and generates a weighted combined speaker embedding vector, which helps the model to normalize the speaker variations. The SAST model trained in this way becomes independent of specific training speakers and thus generalizes better to unseen testing speakers. We investigate different factors of SAM. Experimental results on the AISHELL-1 task show that SAST achieves a relative 6.5% CER reduction (CERR) over the speaker-independent (SI) baseline. Moreover, we demonstrate that SAST still works quite well even if the i-vectors in SKB all come from a different data source other than the acoustic training set.
We propose an end-to-end speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition model that unifies speaker counting, speech recognition, and speaker identification on monaural overlapped speech. Our model is built on serialized output training (SOT) with attention-based encoder-decoder, a recently proposed method for recognizing overlapped speech comprising an arbitrary number of speakers. We extend SOT by introducing a speaker inventory as an auxiliary input to produce speaker labels as well as multi-speaker transcriptions. All model parameters are optimized by speaker-attributed maximum mutual info…
We propose speaker separation using speaker inventories and estimated speech (SSUSIES), a framework leveraging speaker profiles and estimated speech for speaker separation. SSUSIES contains two methods, speaker separation using speaker inventories (SSUSI) and speaker separation using estimated speech (SSUES). SSUSI performs speaker separation with the help of speaker inventory. By combining the advantages of permutation invariant training (PIT) and speech extraction, SSUSI significantly outperforms conventional approaches. SSUES is a widely applicable technique that can substantially improve s…
Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学）；Sharif DeepMine Ltd.（谢里夫DeepMine有限公司）
DeepMine is a speech database in Persian and English designed to build and evaluate text-dependent, text-prompted, and text-independent speaker verification, as well as Persian speech recognition systems. It contains more than 1850 speakers and 540 thousand recordings overall, more than 480 hours of speech are transcribed. It is the first public large-scale speaker verification database in Persian, the largest public text-dependent and text-prompted speaker verification database in English, and the largest public evaluation dataset for text-independent speaker verification. It has a good cover…
In this paper, we propose a novel auxiliary loss function for target-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our method automatically extracts and transcribes target speaker's utterances from a monaural mixture of multiple speakers speech given a short sample of the target speaker. The proposed auxiliary loss function attempts to additionally maximize interference speaker ASR accuracy during training. This will regularize the network to achieve a better representation for speaker separation, thus achieving better accuracy on the target-speaker ASR. We evaluated our proposed method using tw…
This paper investigates the use of target-speaker automatic speech recognition (TS-ASR) for simultaneous speech recognition and speaker diarization of single-channel dialogue recordings. TS-ASR is a technique to automatically extract and recognize only the speech of a target speaker given a short sample utterance of that speaker. One obvious drawback of TS-ASR is that it cannot be used when the speakers in the recordings are unknown because it requires a sample of the target speakers in advance of decoding. To remove this limitation, we propose an iterative method, in which (i) the estimation …
Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学自然语言处理研究所（IMS））
This paper presents our latest investigation on end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) for overlapped speech. We propose to train an end-to-end system conditioned on speaker embeddings and further improved by transfer learning from clean speech. This proposed framework does not require any parallel non-overlapped speech materials and is independent of the number of speakers. Our experimental results on overlapped speech datasets show that joint conditioning on speaker embeddings and transfer learning significantly improves the ASR performance.
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory（东芝剑桥研究实验室）
In this paper, we present a novel multi-channel speech extraction system to simultaneously extract multiple clean individual sources from a mixture in noisy and reverberant environments. The proposed method is built on an improved multi-channel time-domain speech separation network which employs speaker embeddings to identify and extract multiple targets without label permutation ambiguity. To efficiently inform the speaker information to the extraction model, we propose a new speaker conditioning mechanism by designing an additional speaker branch for receiving external speaker embeddings. Ex…
Human-Computer Communications Laboratory（人机通信实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SpeechX Limited（SpeechX有限公司）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Though significant progress has been made for the voice conversion (VC) of typical speech, VC for atypical speech, e.g., dysarthric and second-language (L2) speech, remains a challenge, since it involves correcting for atypical prosody while maintaining speaker identity. To address this issue, we propose a VC system with explicit prosodic modelling and deep speaker embedding (DSE) learning. First, a speech-encoder strives to extract robust phoneme embeddings from atypical speech. Second, a prosody corrector takes in phoneme embeddings to infer typical phoneme duration and pitch values. Third, …
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）
In previous work, we developed a closed-loop speech chain model based on deep learning, in which the architecture enabled the automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) components to mutually improve their performance. This was accomplished by the two parts teaching each other using both labeled and unlabeled data. This approach could significantly improve model performance within a single-speaker speech dataset, but only a slight increase could be gained in multi-speaker tasks. Furthermore, the model is still unable to handle unseen speakers. In this paper, we prese…
In order to protect the privacy of speech data, speaker anonymization aims for hiding the identity of a speaker by changing the voice in speech recordings. This typically comes with a privacy-utility trade-off between protection of individuals and usability of the data for downstream applications. One of the challenges in this context is to create non-existent voices that sound as natural as possible. In this work, we propose to tackle this issue by generating speaker embeddings using a generative adversarial network with Wasserstein distance as cost function. By incorporating these artificial…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SpeechX Limited（深圳声希科技有限公司）；Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence（感知与交互智能中心）
Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR), which aims to improve the quality of dysarthric speech, remains a challenge, not only because we need to restore the speech to be normal, but also must preserve the speaker's identity. The speaker representation extracted by the speaker encoder (SE) optimized for speaker verification has been explored to control the speaker identity. However, the SE may not be able to fully capture the characteristics of dysarthric speakers that are previously unseen. To address this research problem, we propose a novel multi-task learning strategy, i.e., adversarial spe…
Speech recognition in cocktail-party environments remains a significant challenge for state-of-the-art speech recognition systems, as it is extremely difficult to extract an acoustic signal of an individual speaker from a background of overlapping speech with similar frequency and temporal characteristics. We propose the use of speaker-targeted acoustic and audio-visual models for this task. We complement the acoustic features in a hybrid DNN-HMM model with information of the target speaker's identity as well as visual features from the mouth region of the target speaker. Experimentation was p…
Speech self-supervised models such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT are making revolutionary progress in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, they have not been totally proven to produce better performance on tasks other than ASR. In this work, we explored partial fine-tuning and entire fine-tuning on wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT pre-trained models for three non-ASR speech tasks: Speech Emotion Recognition, Speaker Verification and Spoken Language Understanding. With simple proposed downstream frameworks, the best scores reached 79.58% weighted accuracy on speaker-dependent setting and 73.01% weigh…
NTT Corporation（日本电报电话公司）；Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学）；IT4I Center of Excellence（IT4I卓越中心）
Target speech extraction, which extracts the speech of a target speaker in a mixture given auxiliary speaker clues, has recently received increased interest. Various clues have been investigated such as pre-recorded enrollment utterances, direction information, or video of the target speaker. In this paper, we explore the use of speaker activity information as an auxiliary clue for single-channel neural network-based speech extraction. We propose a speaker activity driven speech extraction neural network (ADEnet) and show that it can achieve performance levels competitive with enrollment-based…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
In this paper, we construct a new Japanese speech corpus called "JTubeSpeech." Although recent end-to-end learning requires large-size speech corpora, open-sourced such corpora for languages other than English have not yet been established. In this paper, we describe the construction of a corpus from YouTube videos and subtitles for speech recognition and speaker verification. Our method can automatically filter the videos and subtitles with almost no language-dependent processes. We consistently employ Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC)-based techniques for automatic speech recogniti…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Bytedance AI LAB（字节跳动人工智能实验室）
In multi-talker scenarios such as meetings and conversations, speech processing systems are usually required to segment the audio and then transcribe each segmentation. These two stages are addressed separately by speaker change detection (SCD) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). Most previous SCD systems rely solely on speaker information and ignore the importance of speech content. In this paper, we propose a novel SCD system that considers both cues of speaker difference and speech content. These two cues are converted into token-level representations by the continuous integrate-and-fir…
In multi-talker scenarios such as meetings and conversations, speech processing systems are usually required to transcribe the audio as well as identify the speakers for downstream applications. Since overlapped speech is common in this case, conventional approaches usually address this problem in a cascaded fashion that involves speech separation, speech recognition and speaker identification that are trained independently. In this paper, we propose Streaming Unmixing, Recognition and Identification Transducer (SURIT) -- a new framework that deals with this problem in an end-to-end streaming …
University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Erik Jonsson School of Engineering（埃里克·琼森工程学院）；Center for Robust Speech Systems (CRSS)（鲁棒语音系统中心（CRSS））
This study addresses the problem of single-channel Automatic Speech Recognition of a target speaker within an overlap speech scenario. In the proposed method, the hidden representations in the acoustic model are modulated by speaker auxiliary information to recognize only the desired speaker. Affine transformation layers are inserted into the acoustic model network to integrate speaker information with the acoustic features. The speaker conditioning process allows the acoustic model to perform computation in the context of target-speaker auxiliary information. The proposed speaker conditioning…
In this paper, we propose a multi-speaker face-to-speech waveform generation model that also works for unseen speaker conditions. Using a generative adversarial network (GAN) with linguistic and speaker characteristic features as auxiliary conditions, our method directly converts face images into speech waveforms under an end-to-end training framework. The linguistic features are extracted from lip movements using a lip-reading model, and the speaker characteristic features are predicted from face images using cross-modal learning with a pre-trained acoustic model. Since these two features are…
Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）
Speech representation learning has improved both speech understanding and speech synthesis tasks for single language. However, its ability in cross-lingual scenarios has not been explored. In this paper, we extend the pretraining method for cross-lingual multi-speaker speech synthesis tasks, including cross-lingual multi-speaker voice cloning and cross-lingual multi-speaker speech editing. We propose a speech-text joint pretraining framework, where we randomly mask the spectrogram and the phonemes given a speech example and its transcription. By learning to reconstruct the masked parts of the …
While the use of deep neural networks has significantly boosted speaker recognition performance, it is still challenging to separate speakers in poor acoustic environments. Here speech enhancement methods have traditionally allowed improved performance. The recent works have shown that adapting speech enhancement can lead to further gains. This paper introduces a novel approach that cascades speech enhancement and speaker recognition. In the first step, a speaker embedding vector is generated , which is used in the second step to enhance the speech quality and re-identify the speakers. Models …
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation（日本电信电话株式会社NTT通信科学实验室）；Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学）
Target speech extraction, which extracts a single target source in a mixture given clues about the target speaker, has attracted increasing attention. We have recently proposed SpeakerBeam, which exploits an adaptation utterance of the target speaker to extract his/her voice characteristics that are then used to guide a neural network towards extracting speech of that speaker. SpeakerBeam presents a practical alternative to speech separation as it enables tracking speech of a target speaker across utterances, and achieves promising speech extraction performance. However, it sometimes fails whe…
Recently, end-to-end multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) systems gain success in the situation where a lot of high-quality speech plus their corresponding transcriptions are available. However, laborious paired data collection processes prevent many institutes from building multi-speaker TTS systems of great performance. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised learning approach for multi-speaker TTS. A multi-speaker TTS model can learn from the untranscribed audio via the proposed encoder-decoder framework with discrete speech representation. The experiment results demonstrate that with only…
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)（伍斯特理工学院（WPI））
We propose a new method for speaker diarization that can handle overlapping speech with 2+ people. Our method is based on compositional embeddings [1]: Like standard speaker embedding methods such as x-vector [2], compositional embedding models contain a function f that separates speech from different speakers. In addition, they include a composition function g to compute set-union operations in the embedding space so as to infer the set of speakers within the input audio. In an experiment on multi-person speaker identification using synthesized LibriSpeech data, the proposed method outperform…
In recent years, emotional text-to-speech has shown considerable progress. However, it requires a large amount of labeled data, which is not easily accessible. Even if it is possible to acquire an emotional speech dataset, there is still a limitation in controlling emotion intensity. In this work, we propose a novel method for cross-speaker emotion transfer and manipulation using vector arithmetic in latent style space. By leveraging only a few labeled samples, we generate emotional speech from reading-style speech without losing the speaker identity. Furthermore, emotion strength is readily c…
National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies)（综合研究大学院大学（简称SOKENDAI））；KDDI Research Inc.（KDDI研究株式会社）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
When the available data of a target speaker is insufficient to train a high quality speaker-dependent neural text-to-speech (TTS) system, we can combine data from multiple speakers and train a multi-speaker TTS model instead. Many studies have shown that neural multi-speaker TTS model trained with a small amount data from multiple speakers combined can generate synthetic speech with better quality and stability than a speaker-dependent one. However when the amount of data from each speaker is highly unbalanced, the best approach to make use of the excessive data remains unknown. Our experiment…
Analysis of Speech Temporal Dynamics in the Context of Speaker Verification and Voice Anonymization
Université de Lorraine, CNRS, Inria Loria（卢瓦尔大学、法国国家科学研究中心、Inria Loria）；Université de Lille, CNRS, Inria Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 - CRIStAL Lille（里尔大学、法国国家科学研究中心、Inria Centrale Lille、UMR 9189 - CRIStAL Lille）
Personalizing a speech synthesis system is a highly desired application, where the system can generate speech with the user's voice with rare enrolled recordings. There are two main approaches to build such a system in recent works: speaker adaptation and speaker encoding. On the one hand, speaker adaptation methods fine-tune a trained multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) model with few enrolled samples. However, they require at least thousands of fine-tuning steps for high-quality adaptation, making it hard to apply on devices. On the other hand, speaker encoding methods encode enrollment utter…
Recently, the research on ad-hoc microphone arrays with deep learning has drawn much attention, especially in speech enhancement and separation. Because an ad-hoc microphone array may cover such a large area that multiple speakers may locate far apart and talk independently, target-dependent speech separation, which aims to extract a target speaker from a mixed speech, is important for extracting and tracing a specific speaker in the ad-hoc array. However, this technique has not been explored yet. In this paper, we propose deep ad-hoc beamforming based on speaker extraction, which is to our kn…
Sentiment analysis has evolved over past few decades, most of the work in it revolved around textual sentiment analysis with text mining techniques. But audio sentiment analysis is still in a nascent stage in the research community. In this proposed research, we perform sentiment analysis on speaker discriminated speech transcripts to detect the emotions of the individual speakers involved in the conversation. We analyzed different techniques to perform speaker discrimination and sentiment analysis to find efficient algorithms to perform this task.
Adapting a neural text-to-speech (TTS) model to a target speaker typically involves fine-tuning most if not all of the parameters of a pretrained multi-speaker backbone model. However, serving hundreds of fine-tuned neural TTS models is expensive as each of them requires significant footprint and separate computational resources (e.g., accelerators, memory). To scale speaker adapted neural TTS voices to hundreds of speakers while preserving the naturalness and speaker similarity, this paper proposes a parameter-efficient few-shot speaker adaptation, where the backbone model is augmented with t…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Bremen（不来梅大学）；Kriston AI Lab（Kriston AI实验室）
Speaker extraction aims to mimic humans' selective auditory attention by extracting a target speaker's voice from a multi-talker environment. It is common to perform the extraction in frequency-domain, and reconstruct the time-domain signal from the extracted magnitude and estimated phase spectra. However, such an approach is adversely affected by the inherent difficulty of phase estimation. Inspired by Conv-TasNet, we propose a time-domain speaker extraction network (SpEx) that converts the mixture speech into multi-scale embedding coefficients instead of decomposing the speech signal into ma…
National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；Unversity of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
This paper proposes a new architecture for speaker adaptation of multi-speaker neural-network speech synthesis systems, in which an unseen speaker's voice can be built using a relatively small amount of speech data without transcriptions. This is sometimes called "unsupervised speaker adaptation". More specifically, we concatenate the layers to the audio inputs when performing unsupervised speaker adaptation while we concatenate them to the text inputs when synthesizing speech from text. Two new training schemes for the new architecture are also proposed in this paper. These training schemes a…
Recent advances in neural multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) models have enabled the generation of reasonably good speech quality with a single model and made it possible to synthesize the speech of a speaker with limited training data. Fine-tuning to the target speaker data with the multi-speaker model can achieve better quality, however, there still exists a gap compared to the real speech sample and the model depends on the speaker. In this work, we propose GANSpeech, which is a high-fidelity multi-speaker TTS model that adopts the adversarial training method to a non-autoregressive multi-s…
We describe a neural network-based system for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis that is able to generate speech audio in the voice of many different speakers, including those unseen during training. Our system consists of three independently trained components: (1) a speaker encoder network, trained on a speaker verification task using an independent dataset of noisy speech from thousands of speakers without transcripts, to generate a fixed-dimensional embedding vector from seconds of reference speech from a target speaker; (2) a sequence-to-sequence synthesis network based on Tacotron 2, which g…
With the popularity of deep neural network, speech synthesis task has achieved significant improvements based on the end-to-end encoder-decoder framework in the recent days. More and more applications relying on speech synthesis technology have been widely used in our daily life. Robust speech synthesis model depends on high quality and customized data which needs lots of collecting efforts. It is worth investigating how to take advantage of low-quality and low resource voice data which can be easily obtained from the Internet for usage of synthesizing personalized voice. In this paper, the pr…
Cross-speaker style transfer in speech synthesis aims at transferring a style from source speaker to synthesised speech of a target speaker's timbre. Most previous approaches rely on data with style labels, but manually-annotated labels are expensive and not always reliable. In response to this problem, we propose Style-Label-Free, a cross-speaker style transfer method, which can realize the style transfer from source speaker to target speaker without style labels. Firstly, a reference encoder structure based on quantized variational autoencoder (Q-VAE) and style bottleneck is designed to extr…
National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies)（综合研究大学院大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
By representing speaker characteristic as a single fixed-length vector extracted solely from speech, we can train a neural multi-speaker speech synthesis model by conditioning the model on those vectors. This model can also be adapted to unseen speakers regardless of whether the transcript of adaptation data is available or not. However, this setup restricts the speaker component to just a single bias vector, which in turn limits the performance of adaptation process. In this study, we propose a novel speech synthesis model, which can be adapted to unseen speakers by fine-tuning part of or all…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；AITRICS
With rapid progress in neural text-to-speech (TTS) models, personalized speech generation is now in high demand for many applications. For practical applicability, a TTS model should generate high-quality speech with only a few audio samples from the given speaker, that are also short in length. However, existing methods either require to fine-tune the model or achieve low adaptation quality without fine-tuning. In this work, we propose StyleSpeech, a new TTS model which not only synthesizes high-quality speech but also effectively adapts to new speakers. Specifically, we propose Style-Adaptiv…
