Papers › PromptTTS: Controllable Text-to-Speech with Text Descriptions

PromptTTS: Controllable Text-to-Speech with Text Descriptions

22 Nov 2022arXiv:2211.12171archive 2025-07-28

Zhifang Guo, Yichong Leng, Yihan Wu, Sheng Zhao, Xu Tan

Using a text description as prompt to guide the generation of text or images (e.g., GPT-3 or DALLE-2) has drawn wide attention recently. Beyond text and image generation, in this work, we explore the possibility of utilizing text descriptions to guide speech synthesis. Thus, we develop a text-to-speech (TTS) system (dubbed as PromptTTS) that takes a prompt with both style and content descriptions as input to synthesize the corresponding speech. Specifically, PromptTTS consists of a style encoder and a content encoder to extract the corresponding representations from the prompt, and a speech decoder to synthesize speech according to the extracted style and content representations. Compared with previous works in controllable TTS that require users to have acoustic knowledge to understand style factors such as prosody and pitch, PromptTTS is more user-friendly since text descriptions are a more natural way to express speech style (e.g., ''A lady whispers to her friend slowly''). Given that there is no TTS dataset with prompts, to benchmark the task of PromptTTS, we construct and release a dataset containing prompts with style and content information and the corresponding speech. Experiments show that PromptTTS can generate speech with precise style control and high speech quality. Audio samples and our dataset are publicly available.

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cyhuang-tw/speechcaps mentioned on GitHub report

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DecoderSpeech SynthesisText to Speechtext-to-speech

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PromptSpeech

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-3Layer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight Decay

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