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Towards Improving NAM-to-Speech Synthesis Intelligibility using Self-Supervised Speech Models

2024/07/26 by Neil Shah, Shah, Neil, Shirish Karande +3
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and dialogue systems #electronic engineering #information engineering

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.18541

openalex publication_date 2024/07/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We propose a novel approach to significantly improve the intelligibility in the Non-Audible Murmur (NAM)-to-speech conversion task, leveraging self-supervision and sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) learning techniques. Unlike conventional methods that explicitly record ground-truth speech, our methodology relies on self-supervision and speech-to-speech synthesis to simulate ground-truth speech. Despite utilizing simulated speech, our method surpasses the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 29.08% improvement in the Mel-Cepstral Distortion (MCD) metric. Additionally, we present error rates and demonstrate our model's proficiency to synthesize speech in novel voices of interest. Moreover, we present a methodology for augmenting the existing CSTR NAM TIMIT Plus corpus, setting a benchmark with a Word Error Rate (WER) of 42.57% to gauge the intelligibility of the synthesized speech. Speech samples can be found at https://nam2speech.github.io/NAM2Speech/

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