Natural Text-to-Speech Synthesis by Conditioning Spectrogram Predictions from Transformer Network on WaveGlow Vocoder

摘要

Text to Speech (TTS) is a form of speech synthesis where the text is converted into a spoken human-like voice output. The state of the art methods for TTS employs a neural network based approach. This work aims to look at some of the issues and limitations present in the current works, specifically Tacotron-2, and attempts to further improve its performance by modifying its architecture. The modified model uses Transformer network as a Spectrogram Prediction Network (SPN) and WaveGlow as an Audio Generation Network (AGN). For the modified model, performance improvements are seen in terms of the speech output generated for corresponding texts, the inference time taken for audio generation, and a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.10 (out of 5) is obtained.