Analysis and Assessment of Controllability of an Expressive Deep Learning-Based TTS System

In this paper, we study the controllability of an Expressive TTS system trained on a dataset for a continuous control. The dataset is the Blizzard 2013 dataset based on audiobooks read by a female speaker containing a great variability in styles and expressiveness. Controllability is evaluated with...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Noé Tits, Kevin El Haddad, Thierry Dutoit
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-11-01
Series:Informatics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9709/8/4/84
Description
Summary:In this paper, we study the controllability of an Expressive TTS system trained on a dataset for a continuous control. The dataset is the Blizzard 2013 dataset based on audiobooks read by a female speaker containing a great variability in styles and expressiveness. Controllability is evaluated with both an objective and a subjective experiment. The objective assessment is based on a measure of correlation between acoustic features and the dimensions of the latent space representing expressiveness. The subjective assessment is based on a perceptual experiment in which users are shown an interface for Controllable Expressive TTS and asked to retrieve a synthetic utterance whose expressiveness subjectively corresponds to that a reference utterance.
ISSN:2227-9709