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arXiv · 2502.02703

Developing multilingual speech synthesis system for Ojibwe, Mi'kmaq, and Maliseet

Shenran Wang·Changbing Yang·Mike Parkhill·Chad Quinn·Christopher Hammerly·Jian Zhu
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Abstract

We present lightweight flow matching multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) systems for Ojibwe, Mi'kmaq, and Maliseet, three Indigenous languages in North America. Our results show that training a multilingual TTS model on three typologically similar languages can improve the performance over monolingual models, especially when data are scarce. Attention-free architectures are highly competitive with self-attention architecture with higher memory efficiency. Our research not only advances technical development for the revitalization of low-resource languages but also highlights the cultural gap in human evaluation protocols, calling for a more community-centered approach to human evaluation.

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Shenran Wang, Changbing Yang, Mike Parkhill, Chad Quinn, Christopher Hammerly, Jian Zhu. 2025-02-04. Developing multilingual speech synthesis system for Ojibwe, Mi'kmaq, and Maliseet. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02703

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