Papers › In Other News: A Bi-style Text-to-speech Model for Synthesizing Newscaster Voice with...

In Other News: A Bi-style Text-to-speech Model for Synthesizing Newscaster Voice with Limited Data

4 Apr 2019NAACL 2019 6arXiv:1904.02790archive 2025-07-28

Nishant Prateek, Mateusz Łajszczak, Roberto Barra-Chicote, Thomas Drugman, Jaime Lorenzo-Trueba, Thomas Merritt, Srikanth Ronanki, Trevor Wood

Neural text-to-speech synthesis (NTTS) models have shown significant progress in generating high-quality speech, however they require a large quantity of training data. This makes creating models for multiple styles expensive and time-consuming. In this paper different styles of speech are analysed based on prosodic variations, from this a model is proposed to synthesise speech in the style of a newscaster, with just a few hours of supplementary data. We pose the problem of synthesising in a target style using limited data as that of creating a bi-style model that can synthesise both neutral-style and newscaster-style speech via a one-hot vector which factorises the two styles. We also propose conditioning the model on contextual word embeddings, and extensively evaluate it against neutral NTTS, and neutral concatenative-based synthesis. This model closes the gap in perceived style-appropriateness between natural recordings for newscaster-style of speech, and neutral speech synthesis by approximately two-thirds.

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Speech SynthesisText to SpeechText-To-Speech SynthesisWord Embeddingstext-to-speech

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