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 | ||
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. |