Yahuan Cong

Yahuan Cong, Ran Zhang, Jian Luan

Current end-to-end autoregressive TTS systems (e.g. Tacotron 2) have outperformed traditional parallel approaches on the quality of synthesized speech. However, they introduce new problems at the same time. Due to the autoregressive nature, the time cost of inference has to be proportional to the length of text, which pose a great challenge for online serving. On the other hand, the style of synthetic speech becomes unstable and may change obviously among sentences. In this paper, we propose a Phrase based Parallel End-to-End TTS System (PPSpeech) to address these issues. PPSpeech uses autoregression approach within a phrase and executes parallel strategies for different phrases. By this method, we can achieve both high quality and high efficiency. In addition, we propose acoustic embedding and text context embedding as the conditions of encoder to keep successive and prevent from abrupt style or timbre change. Experiments show that, the synthesis speed of PPSpeech is much faster than sentence level autoregressive Tacotron 2 when a sentence has more than 5 phrases. The speed advantage increases with the growth of sentence length. Subjective experiments show that the proposed system with acoustic embedding and context embedding as conditions can make the style transition across sentences gradient and natural, defeating Global Style Token (GST) obviously in MOS.

Yifan Ding, Yong Xu, Shi-Xiong Zhang et al.

Speaker diarization, which is to find the speech segments of specific speakers, has been widely used in human-centered applications such as video conferences or human-computer interaction systems. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised audio-video synchronization learning method to address the problem of speaker diarization without massive labeling effort. We improve the previous approaches by introducing two new loss functions: the dynamic triplet loss and the multinomial loss. We test them on a real-world human-computer interaction system and the results show our best model yields a remarkable gain of +8%F1-scoresas well as diarization error rate reduction. Finally, we introduce a new large scale audio-video corpus designed to fill the vacancy of audio-video datasets in Chinese.