A Fast and High-quality Text-to-Speech Method with Compressed Auxiliary Corpus and Limited Target Speaker Corpus

Abstract

With an auxiliary corpus (non-target speaker corpus) for model pre-training, Text-to-Speech (TTS) methods can generate high-quality speech with a limited target speaker corpus. However, this approach comes with expensive training costs. To overcome the challenge, a high-quality TTS method is proposed, significantly reducing training costs while maintaining the naturalness of synthesized speech. In this paper, we propose an auxiliary corpus compression algorithm that reduces the training cost while the naturalness of the synthesized speech is not significantly degraded. We then use the compressed corpus to pre-train the proposed TTS model CMDTTS, which fuses phoneme and word multi-level prosody modeling components and denoises the generated mel-spectrograms using denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs). In addition, a fine-tuning step that the conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) is introduced to embed the target speaker feature and improve speech quality using the target speaker corpus. Experiments are conducted on Chinese and English single speaker’s corpora, and the results show that the method effectively balances the model training speed and the synthesized speech quality and outperforms the current models.