Prosody-Controllable Spontaneous TTS with Neural HMMsShow others and affiliations
2023 (English)In: International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2023Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Spontaneous speech has many affective and pragmatic functions that are interesting and challenging to model in TTS. However, the presence of reduced articulation, fillers, repetitions, and other disfluencies in spontaneous speech make the text and acoustics less aligned than in read speech, which is problematic for attention-based TTS. We propose a TTS architecture that can rapidly learn to speak from small and irregular datasets, while also reproducing the diversity of expressive phenomena present in spontaneous speech. Specifically, we add utterance-level prosody control to an existing neural HMM-based TTS system which is capable of stable, monotonic alignments for spontaneous speech. We objectively evaluate control accuracy and perform perceptual tests that demonstrate that prosody control does not degrade synthesis quality. To exemplify the power of combining prosody control and ecologically valid data for reproducing intricate spontaneous speech phenomena, we evaluate the system’s capability of synthesizing two types of creaky voice.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2023.
Keywords [en]
Speech Synthesis, Prosodic Control, NeuralHMM, Spontaneous speech, Creaky voice
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-327893DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP49357.2023.10097200Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-86000382699OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-327893DiVA, id: diva2:1761460
Conference
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Rhodes Island, Greece, June 4-10, 2023
Funder
Swedish Research Council, VR-2019-05003Swedish Research Council, VR-2020-02396Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, P20-0298Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, WASP
Note
Part of ISBN 9781728163277
QC 20250623
2023-06-012023-06-012025-06-23Bibliographically approved