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Simple and Effective Multi-Sentence TTS with Expressive and Coherent Prosody (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Jun 30, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They tested simple upgrades to a Transformer speech synthesizer—feeding it longer stretches of text, word-level hints from a large language model, and training on many speakers—to make multi-sentence speech sound natural. Together these beat every competing system in listener-rated naturalness.

Abstract · Simple and Effective Multi-sentence TTS with Expressive and Coherent Prosody

Generating expressive and contextually appropriate prosody remains a challenge for modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems. This is particularly evident for long, multi-sentence inputs. In this paper, we examine simple extensions to a Transformer-based FastSpeech-like system, with the goal of improving prosody for multi-sentence TTS. We find that long context, powerful text features, and training on multi-speaker data all improve prosody. More interestingly, they result in synergies. Long context disambiguates prosody, improves coherence, and plays to the strengths of Transformers. Fine-tuning word-level features from a powerful language model, such as BERT, appears to profit from more training data, readily available in a multi-speaker setting. We look into objective metrics on pausing and pacing and perform thorough subjective evaluations for speech naturalness. Our main system, which incorporates all the extensions, achieves consistently strong results, including statistically significant improvements in speech naturalness over all its competitors.

Peter Makarov, Ammar Abbas, Mateusz Łajszczak, Arnaud Joly, Sri Karlapati, Alexis Moinet, Thomas Drugman, Penny Karanasou
arXiv:2206.14643 · eess.AS, cs.CL · submitted Jun 29, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to be published in the Proceedings of InterSpeech 2022

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