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Deep Voice: Real-Time Neural Text-To-Speech (2017) (arxiv.org)
59 points by seycombi on Mar 6, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | 2 comments on HN

In plain words: A speech system that turns text into voice using only neural networks, replacing the hand-tuned parts of older systems with five learned steps. It can speak faster than real time, with its audio generator running up to 400 times faster than earlier implementations.

Abstract · Deep Voice: Real-time Neural Text-to-Speech

We present Deep Voice, a production-quality text-to-speech system constructed entirely from deep neural networks. Deep Voice lays the groundwork for truly end-to-end neural speech synthesis. The system comprises five major building blocks: a segmentation model for locating phoneme boundaries, a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion model, a phoneme duration prediction model, a fundamental frequency prediction model, and an audio synthesis model. For the segmentation model, we propose a novel way of performing phoneme boundary detection with deep neural networks using connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss. For the audio synthesis model, we implement a variant of WaveNet that requires fewer parameters and trains faster than the original. By using a neural network for each component, our system is simpler and more flexible than traditional text-to-speech systems, where each component requires laborious feature engineering and extensive domain expertise. Finally, we show that inference with our system can be performed faster than real time and describe optimized WaveNet inference kernels on both CPU and GPU that achieve up to 400x speedups over existing implementations.

Sercan O. Arik, Mike Chrzanowski, Adam Coates, Gregory Diamos, Andrew Gibiansky, Yongguo Kang, Xian Li, John Miller, Andrew Ng, Jonathan Raiman, Shubho Sengupta, Mohammad Shoeybi
arXiv:1702.07825 · cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.NE, cs.SD · submitted Feb 25, 2017 · updated Mar 7, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · Submitted to ICML 2017

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Also discussed: Feb 2017 (15 points, 1 comment)

We had a discussion about this http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-production-quality-text... six days ago, with demos.

This post links the arxiv paper instead.

Old discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13756489

This is really cool, and something I've been keeping an eye out for, as current text to speech engines are for the most part sub par. I didn't read the paper, just the extract, but I hope its open sourced.