6 accepted papers
We introduce Matcha-TTS, a new encoder-decoder architecture for speedy TTS acoustic modelling, trained using optimal-transport conditional flow matching (OT-CFM). This yields an ODE-based decoder capable of high output quality in fewer synthesis steps than models trained using score matching. Carefu…
As text-to-speech technologies achieve remarkable naturalness in read-aloud tasks, there is growing interest in multimodal synthesis of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviour, such as spontaneous speech and associated body gestures. This paper presents a novel, unified architecture for jointl…
Spontaneous speech has many affective and pragmatic functions that are interesting and challenging to model in TTS. However, the presence of reduced articulation, fillers, repetitions, and other disfluencies in spontaneous speech make the text and acoustics less aligned than in read speech, which is…
Neural sequence-to-sequence TTS has achieved significantly better output quality than statistical speech synthesis using HMMs. However, neural TTS is generally not probabilistic and uses non-monotonic attention. Attention failures increase training time and can make synthesis babble incoherently. Th…
Breathing and speech planning in spontaneous speech are coordinated processes, often exhibiting disfluent patterns. While synthetic speech is not subject to respiratory needs, integrating breath into synthesis has advantages for naturalness and recall. At the same time, a synthetic voice reproducing…
This paper considers utilising breaths to create improved spontaneous-speech corpora for conversational text-to-speech from found audio recordings such as dialogue podcasts. Breaths are of interest since they relate to prosody and speech planning and are independent of language and transcription. Sp…