{"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/wave-tacotron-spectrogram-free-end-to-end","title":"Wave-Tacotron: Spectrogram-free end-to-end text-to-speech synthesis","arxiv_id":"2011.03568","date":"2020-11-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ron J. Weiss","RJ Skerry-Ryan","Eric Battenberg","Soroosh Mariooryad","Diederik P. Kingma"],"abstract":"We describe a sequence-to-sequence neural network which directly generates speech waveforms from text inputs. The architecture extends the Tacotron model by incorporating a normalizing flow into the autoregressive decoder loop. Output waveforms are modeled as a sequence of non-overlapping fixed-length blocks, each one containing hundreds of samples. The interdependencies of waveform samples within each block are modeled using the normalizing flow, enabling parallel training and synthesis. Longer-term dependencies are handled autoregressively by conditioning each flow on preceding blocks.This model can be optimized directly with maximum likelihood, with-out using intermediate, hand-designed features nor additional loss terms. Contemporary state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) systems use a cascade of separately learned models: one (such as Tacotron) which generates intermediate features (such as spectrograms) from text, followed by a vocoder (such as WaveRNN) which generates waveform samples from the intermediate features. The proposed system, in contrast, does not use a fixed intermediate representation, and learns all parameters end-to-end. Experiments show that the proposed model generates speech with quality approaching a state-of-the-art neural TTS system, with significantly improved generation speed.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03568v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.03568v2.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":"wave-tacotron-spectrogram-free-end-to-end","repo_url":"https://github.com/ai-unicamp/tts-objective-metrics","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"speech-synthesis","task_name":"Speech Synthesis"},{"task_slug":"text-to-speech","task_name":"Text to Speech"},{"task_slug":"text-to-speech-synthesis","task_name":"Text-To-Speech Synthesis"},{"task_slug":"text-to-speech-1","task_name":"text-to-speech"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"batch-normalization","method_name":"Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"bigru","method_name":"BiGRU"},{"method_slug":"cbhg","method_name":"CBHG"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gru","method_name":"GRU"},{"method_slug":"griffin-lim-algorithm","method_name":"Griffin-Lim Algorithm"},{"method_slug":"highway-layer","method_name":"Highway Layer"},{"method_slug":"highway-network","method_name":"Highway Network"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"residual-gru","method_name":"Residual GRU"},{"method_slug":"sigmoid-activation","method_name":"Sigmoid Activation"},{"method_slug":"tacotron","method_name":"Tacotron"},{"method_slug":"tanh-activation","method_name":"Tanh Activation"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2011.03568","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}