Authors: Yuxuan Wang, RJ Skerry-Ryan, Daisy Stanton, Yonghui Wu, Ron J. Weiss, Navdeep Jaitly, Zongheng Yang, Ying Xiao, Zhifeng Chen, Samy Bengio, Quoc Le, Yannis Agiomyrgiannakis, Rob Clark, Rif A. Saurous
Abstract: A text-to-speech synthesis system typically consists
of multiple stages, such as a text analysis frontend, an acoustic model
and an audio synthesis module. Building these components often requires
extensive domain expertise and may contain brittle design choices. In this
paper, we present Tacotron, an end-to-end generative text-to-speech model
that synthesizes speech directly from characters. Given <text,
audio> pairs, the model can be trained completely from scratch with
random initialization. We present several key techniques to make the
sequence-to-sequence framework perform well for this challenging
task. Tacotron achieves a 3.82 subjective 5-scale mean opinion score on US
English, outperforming a production parametric system in terms of
naturalness. In addition, since Tacotron generates speech at the frame
level, it's substantially faster than sample-level autoregressive
methods.
All of the below phrases are unseen by Tacotron during training.
Tacotron works well on out-of-domain and complex words.
“Generative adversarial network or variational auto-encoder.”
“Basilar membrane and otolaryngology are not auto-correlations.”
Tacotron learns pronunciations based on phrase semantics.
(Note how Tacotron pronounces "read" in the two phrases.)
“He has read the whole thing.”
“He reads books.”
Tacotron is somewhat robust to spelling errors.
“Thisss isrealy awhsome.”
Tacotron is sensitive to punctuation.
(Note how the comma in the first phrase changes prosody.)
“This is your personal assistant, Google Home.”
“This is your personal assistant Google Home.”
Tacotron learns stress and intonation.
(The speaker is instructed to stress on capitalized words in our
training set. So simply capitalizing some words will change the overall
intonation.)
“The buses aren't the problem, they actually provide a solution.”
“The buses aren't the PROBLEM, they actually provide a SOLUTION.”
Tacotron's prosody changes when turning a statement into a question.
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
“Does the quick brown fox jump over the lazy dog?”
Ablation Experiments
Comparing vanilla seq2seq vs. Tacotron
“Talib Kweli confirmed to AllHipHop that he will be releasing an album in the next year.”
Vanilla seq2seq
Tacotron
Comparing the GRU encoder vs. the CBHG encoder
“The blue lagoon is a nineteen eighty American romance adventure film.”
GRU encoder
CBHG encoder
“Talib Kweli confirmed to AllHipHop that he will be releasing an album in the next year.”
GRU encoder
CBHG encoder
Comparing with and without the post-processing network.