Today I read a paper titled “A High Quality Text-To-Speech System Composed of Multiple Neural Networks”
The abstract is:
While neural networks have been employed to handle several different text-to-speech tasks, ours is the first system to use neural networks throughout, for both linguistic and acoustic processing.
We divide the text-to-speech task into three subtasks, a linguistic module mapping from text to a linguistic representation, an acoustic module mapping from the linguistic representation to speech, and a video module mapping from the linguistic representation to animated images.
The linguistic module employs a letter-to-sound neural network and a postlexical neural network.
The acoustic module employs a duration neural network and a phonetic neural network.
The visual neural network is employed in parallel to the acoustic module to drive a talking head.
The use of neural networks that can be retrained on the characteristics of different voices and languages affords our system a degree of adaptability and naturalness heretofore unavailable.