In plain words: A system copies a voice from a few recordings by retraining a multi-speaker speech generator on them or having a network compute a voice signature. Retraining sounded more natural and closer to the original, but the signature route needed far less time and memory.
Abstract
Voice cloning is a highly desired feature for personalized speech interfaces. Neural network based speech synthesis has been shown to generate high quality speech for a large number of speakers. In this paper, we introduce a neural voice cloning system that takes a few audio samples as input. We study two approaches: speaker adaptation and speaker encoding. Speaker adaptation is based on fine-tuning a multi-speaker generative model with a few cloning samples. Speaker encoding is based on training a separate model to directly infer a new speaker embedding from cloning audios and to be used with a multi-speaker generative model. In terms of naturalness of the speech and its similarity to original speaker, both approaches can achieve good performance, even with very few cloning audios. While speaker adaptation can achieve better naturalness and similarity, the cloning time or required memory for the speaker encoding approach is significantly less, making it favorable for low-resource deployment.
Sercan O. Arik, Jitong Chen, Kainan Peng, Wei Ping, Yanqi Zhou
arXiv:1802.06006 · cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.SD, eess.AS · submitted Feb 14, 2018 · updated Oct 12, 2018
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