A comparison of Vietnamese Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis Systems
This work addresses the selection of suitable speech synthesis systems for Vietnamese applications, but it is incremental as it compares existing methods without introducing new techniques.
The paper compared four Vietnamese statistical parametric speech synthesis systems (HMM, DNN, GAN, and E2E) in terms of speech quality and performance efficiency, finding that E2E systems achieved the best quality but required GPU for real-time performance, while HMM-based systems were the most efficient but had inferior quality.
In recent years, statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) systems have been widely utilized in many interactive speech-based systems (e.g.~Amazon's Alexa, Bose's headphones). To select a suitable SPSS system, both speech quality and performance efficiency (e.g.~decoding time) must be taken into account. In the paper, we compared four popular Vietnamese SPSS techniques using: 1) hidden Markov models (HMM), 2) deep neural networks (DNN), 3) generative adversarial networks (GAN), and 4) end-to-end (E2E) architectures, which consists of Tacontron~2 and WaveGlow vocoder in terms of speech quality and performance efficiency. We showed that the E2E systems accomplished the best quality, but required the power of GPU to achieve real-time performance. We also showed that the HMM-based system had inferior speech quality, but it was the most efficient system. Surprisingly, the E2E systems were more efficient than the DNN and GAN in inference on GPU. Surprisingly, the GAN-based system did not outperform the DNN in term of quality.