{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/learning-to-speak-from-text-zero-shot","title":"Learning to Speak from Text: Zero-Shot Multilingual Text-to-Speech with Unsupervised Text Pretraining","arxiv_id":"2301.12596","date":"2023-01-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Takaaki Saeki","Soumi Maiti","Xinjian Li","Shinji Watanabe","Shinnosuke Takamichi","Hiroshi Saruwatari"],"abstract":"While neural text-to-speech (TTS) has achieved human-like natural synthetic speech, multilingual TTS systems are limited to resource-rich languages due to the need for paired text and studio-quality audio data. This paper proposes a method for zero-shot multilingual TTS using text-only data for the target language. The use of text-only data allows the development of TTS systems for low-resource languages for which only textual resources are available, making TTS accessible to thousands of languages. Inspired by the strong cross-lingual transferability of multilingual language models, our framework first performs masked language model pretraining with multilingual text-only data. Then we train this model with a paired data in a supervised manner, while freezing a language-aware embedding layer. This allows inference even for languages not included in the paired data but present in the text-only data. Evaluation results demonstrate highly intelligible zero-shot TTS with a character error rate of less than 12% for an unseen language.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12596v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.12596v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"learning-to-speak-from-text-zero-shot","repo_url":"https://github.com/takaaki-saeki/zm-text-tts","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"text-to-speech","task_name":"Text to Speech"},{"task_slug":"text-to-speech-1","task_name":"text-to-speech"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2301.12596","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}