End-to-end (E2E) systems synthesise high-quality speech, but this typically requires a large amount of data. As E2E synthesis progressed from Tacotron to FastSpeech2, it became evident that features representing prosody, particularly sub-word durations, are important for error-free synthesis. Variants of FastSpeech use a teacher model or forced alignments for training. This paper uses signal processing cues in tandem with forced alignment to produce accurate phone boundaries for the training data. As a result of better duration modelling, good-quality synthesisers are developed. Evaluations indicate that systems developed using the proposed signal processing-aided approach are better than systems developed using other alignment approaches, especially in low-resource scenarios. Our systems also outperform the existing best TTS systems available for 13 Indian languages.
A Spoken dialogue system for an unseen language is referred to as Zero resource speech. It is especially beneficial for developing applications for languages that have low digital resources. Zero resource speech synthesis is the task of building text-to-speech (TTS) models in the absence of transcriptions. In this work, speech is modelled as a sequence of transient and steady-state acoustic units, and a unique set of acoustic units is discovered by iterative training. Using the acoustic unit sequence, TTS models are trained. The main goal of this work is to improve the synthesis quality of zer…
Building text-to-speech (TTS) synthesisers for Indian languages is a difficult task owing to a large number of active languages. Indian languages can be classified into a finite set of families, prominent among them, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. The proposed work exploits this property to build a generic TTS system using multiple languages from the same family in an end-to-end framework. Generic systems are quite robust as they are capable of capturing a variety of phonotactics across languages. These systems are then adapted to a new language in the same family using small amounts of adaptation …
Deep learning based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have been evolving rapidly with advances in model architectures, training methodologies, and generalization across speakers and languages. However, these advances have not been thoroughly investigated for Indian language speech synthesis. Such investigation is computationally expensive given the number and diversity of Indian languages, relatively lower resource availability, and the diverse set of advances in neural TTS that remain untested. In this paper, we evaluate the choice of acoustic models, vocoders, supplementary loss functions, traini…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；SDM College of Engineering and Technology（SDM工程技术学院）
End-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) systems have been developed for European languages like English and Spanish with state-of-the-art speech quality, prosody, and naturalness. However, development of end-to-end TTS for Indian languages is lagging behind in terms of quality. The challenges involved in such a task are: 1) scarcity of quality training data; 2) low efficiency during training and inference; 3) slow convergence in the case of large vocabulary size. In our work reported in this paper, we have investigated the use of fine-tuning the English-pretrained Tacotron2 model with limited Sanskrit…
Zapr Media Labs (Red Brick Lane Marketing Solutions Pvt. Ltd.)（Zapr媒体实验室（红砖巷营销解决方案私人有限公司））
Bilingual English speakers speak English as one of their languages. Their English is of a non-native kind, and their conversations are of a code-mixed fashion. The intelligibility of a bilingual text-to-speech (TTS) system for such non-native English speakers depends on a lexicon that captures the phoneme sequence used by non-native speakers. However, due to the lack of non-native English lexicon, existing bilingual TTS systems employ native English lexicons that are widely available, in addition to their native language lexicon. Due to the inconsistency between the non-native English pronunci…
Government Engineering College（政府工程学院）；A P J Abdul Kalam Technological University（阿卜杜勒·卡拉姆技术大学）；IIIT（印度信息技术学院）；State Project Facilitation Unit（邦项目促进单位）
Modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems use deep learning to synthesize speech increasingly approaching human quality, but they require a database of high quality audio-text sentence pairs for training. Malayalam, the official language of the Indian state of Kerala and spoken by 35+ million people, is a low resource language in terms of available corpora for TTS systems. In this paper, we present IMaSC, a Malayalam text and speech corpora containing approximately 50 hours of recorded speech. With 8 speakers and a total of 34,473 text-audio pairs, IMaSC is larger than every other publicly available…
