| Paper ID | SPE-3.1 |
| Paper Title |
WAVE-TACOTRON: SPECTROGRAM-FREE END-TO-END TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYNTHESIS |
| Authors |
Ron Weiss, RJ Skerry-Ryan, Eric Battenberg, Soroosh Mariooryad, Diederik Kingma, Google, United States |
| Session | SPE-3: Speech Synthesis 1: Architecture |
| Location | Gather.Town |
| Session Time: | Tuesday, 08 June, 13:00 - 13:45 |
| Presentation Time: | Tuesday, 08 June, 13:00 - 13:45 |
| Presentation |
Poster
|
| Topic |
Speech Processing: [SPE-SYNT] Speech Synthesis and Generation |
| IEEE Xplore Open Preview |
Click here to view in IEEE Xplore |
| Virtual Presentation |
Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference |
| Abstract |
We describe a sequence-to-sequence neural network which directly generates speech waveforms from text inputs. The architecture extends the Tacotron model by incorporating a normalizing flow into the autoregressive decoder loop. Output waveforms are modeled as a sequence of non-overlapping fixed-length blocks, each one containing hundreds of samples. The interdependencies of waveform samples within each block are modeled using the normalizing flow, enabling parallel training and synthesis. Longer-term dependencies are handled autoregressively by conditioning each flow on preceding blocks.This model can be optimized directly with maximum likelihood, with-out using intermediate, hand-designed features nor additional loss terms. Contemporary state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) systems use a cascade of separately learned models: one (such as Tacotron) which generates intermediate features (such as spectrograms) from text, followed by a vocoder (such as WaveRNN) which generates waveform samples from the intermediate features. The proposed system, in contrast, does not use a fixed intermediate representation, and learns all parameters end-to-end. Experiments show that the proposed model generates speech with quality approaching a state-of-the-art neural TTS system, with significantly improved generation speed. |
