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arXiv · 2010.03717

Latent linguistic embedding for cross-lingual text-to-speech and voice conversion

Hieu-Thi Luong·Junichi Yamagishi
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Abstract

As the recently proposed voice cloning system, NAUTILUS, is capable of cloning unseen voices using untranscribed speech, we investigate the feasibility of using it to develop a unified cross-lingual TTS/VC system. Cross-lingual speech generation is the scenario in which speech utterances are generated with the voices of target speakers in a language not spoken by them originally. This type of system is not simply cloning the voice of the target speaker, but essentially creating a new voice that can be considered better than the original under a specific framing. By using a well-trained English latent linguistic embedding to create a cross-lingual TTS and VC system for several German, Finnish, and Mandarin speakers included in the Voice Conversion Challenge 2020, we show that our method not only creates cross-lingual VC with high speaker similarity but also can be seamlessly used for cross-lingual TTS without having to perform any extra steps. However, the subjective evaluations of perceived naturalness seemed to vary between target speakers, which is one aspect for future improvement.

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BibTeXRIS

Hieu-Thi Luong, Junichi Yamagishi. 2020-10-08. Latent linguistic embedding for cross-lingual text-to-speech and voice conversion. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03717

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