2018/06/04 by Younggun Lee, Lee, Younggun, Taesu Kim +3
Computer Science · #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 #Topic Modeling #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1806.00927
openalex publication_date 2018/06/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We propose a neural text-to-speech (TTS) model that can imitate a new speaker's voice using only a small amount of speech sample. We demonstrate voice imitation using only a 6-seconds long speech sample without any other information such as transcripts. Our model also enables voice imitation instantly without additional training of the model. We implemented the voice imitating TTS model by combining a speaker embedder network with a state-of-the-art TTS model, Tacotron. The speaker embedder network takes a new speaker's speech sample and returns a speaker embedding. The speaker embedding with a target sentence are fed to Tacotron, and speech is generated with the new speaker's voice. We show that the speaker embeddings extracted by the speaker embedder network can represent the latent structure in different voices. The generated speech samples from our model have comparable voice quality to the ones from existing multi-speaker TTS models.