Extending Multilingual Speech Synthesis to 100+ Languages without Transcribed Data

Takaaki Saeki; Gary Wang; Nobuyuki Morioka; Isaac Elias; Kyle Kastner; Fadi Biadsy; Andrew Rosenberg; Bhuvana Ramabhadran; Heiga Zen; Françoise Beaufays; Hadar Shemtov

arXiv · 2402.18932

Extending Multilingual Speech Synthesis to 100+ Languages without Transcribed Data

Takaaki Saeki·Gary Wang·Nobuyuki Morioka·Isaac Elias·Kyle Kastner·Fadi Biadsy·Andrew Rosenberg·Bhuvana Ramabhadran·Heiga Zen·Françoise Beaufays·Hadar Shemtov

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Abstract

Collecting high-quality studio recordings of audio is challenging, which limits the language coverage of text-to-speech (TTS) systems. This paper proposes a framework for scaling a multilingual TTS model to 100+ languages using found data without supervision. The proposed framework combines speech-text encoder pretraining with unsupervised training using untranscribed speech and unspoken text data sources, thereby leveraging massively multilingual joint speech and text representation learning. Without any transcribed speech in a new language, this TTS model can generate intelligible speech in >30 unseen languages (CER difference of <10% to ground truth). With just 15 minutes of transcribed, found data, we can reduce the intelligibility difference to 1% or less from the ground-truth, and achieve naturalness scores that match the ground-truth in several languages.

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Takaaki Saeki, Gary Wang, Nobuyuki Morioka, Isaac Elias, Kyle Kastner, Fadi Biadsy, Andrew Rosenberg, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Heiga Zen, Françoise Beaufays, Hadar Shemtov. 2024-07-16. Extending Multilingual Speech Synthesis to 100+ Languages without Transcribed Data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18932

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