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An inclusive approach to creating a palette of synthetic voices for gender diversity
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Speech, Music and Hearing, TMH.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1175-840X
Department of Linguistics Cognitive Science, University of Delaware, USA.
2024 (English)In: Interspeech 2024, International Speech Communication Association , 2024, p. 3070-3074Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Mainstream text-to-speech (TTS) technologies predominantly rely on binary, cisgender speech, failing to adequately represent the diversity of gender expansive (e.g., transgender and/or nonbinary) people. This poses challenges, particularly for users of Speech Generating Devices (SGDs) seeking TTS voices that authentically reflect their identity and desired expressive nuances. This paper introduces a novel approach for constructing a palette of controllable gender-expansive TTS voices using recordings from 14 gender-expansive speakers. We employ Constrained PCA to extract gender-independent speaker identity vectors from x-vectors, using acoustic Vocal Tract Length (aVTL) as a known component. The result is applied as a speaker embedding in neural TTS, allowing control over the aVTL and several emergent properties captured as a representation of the vocal space across speakers. In addition to quantitative metrics, we present a community evaluation conducted by nonbinary SGD users.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
International Speech Communication Association , 2024. p. 3070-3074
Keywords [en]
alternative communication, augmentative, diversity, gender and speech, gender expansive, inclusion, nonbinary, speech generating devices, TTS
National Category
Natural Language Processing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-358869DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2024-1543ISI: 001331850103037Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85214804000OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-358869DiVA, id: diva2:1930522
Conference
25th Interspeech Conferece 2024, Kos Island, Greece, Sep 1 2024 - Sep 5 2024
Note

QC 20250128

Available from: 2025-01-23 Created: 2025-01-23 Last updated: 2025-12-05Bibliographically approved

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Székely, Éva

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Total: 105 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf