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Low data? No problem.

September 19, 2022
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Paper: Low-data? No problem: Low-resource, language-agnostic conversational text-to-speech via F0-conditioned data augmentation

Authors: Giulia Comini, Goeric Huybrechts, Manuel Sam Ribeiro, Adam Gabrys, Jaime Lorenzo-Trueba

Abstract

The availability of data in expressive styles across languages is limited, and recording sessions are costly and time consuming. To overcome these issues, we demonstrate how to build low-resource, neural text-to-speech (TTS) voices with only 1 hour of conversational speech, when no other conversational data are available in the same language. Assuming the availability of non-expressive speech data in that language, we propose a 3-step technology: 1) we train an F0-conditioned voice conversion (VC) model as data augmentation technique; 2) we train an F0 predictor to control the conversational flavour of the voice-converted synthetic data; 3) we train a TTS system that consumes the augmented data. We prove that our technology enables F0 controllability, is scalable across speakers and languages and is competitive in terms of naturalness over a state-of-the-art baseline model, another augmented method which does not make use of F0 information.

Samples

We tested our proposed technology on 9 speakers, belonging to 5 different locales (Canadian French, French, German, Italian and Spanish). We performed naturalness evaluations, comparing the proposed technology with original speaker recordings and a baseline TTS model. Here you can listen to the samples of the 9 speakers considered in the paper.

Canadian French

Female speaker
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French

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Male speaker
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German

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Male speaker
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Italian

Female speaker
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Male speaker
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Spanish

Female speaker
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Male speaker
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