Adapting TTS models For New Speakers using Transfer Learning
This addresses the challenge of voice cloning for TTS applications with incremental improvements in data efficiency.
The paper tackles the problem of training text-to-speech models for new speakers with limited data by proposing transfer-learning guidelines to adapt high-quality single-speaker models, achieving comparable performance with just 30 minutes of data versus 27 hours from scratch.
Training neural text-to-speech (TTS) models for a new speaker typically requires several hours of high quality speech data. Prior works on voice cloning attempt to address this challenge by adapting pre-trained multi-speaker TTS models for a new voice, using a few minutes of speech data of the new speaker. However, publicly available large multi-speaker datasets are often noisy, thereby resulting in TTS models that are not suitable for use in products. We address this challenge by proposing transfer-learning guidelines for adapting high quality single-speaker TTS models for a new speaker, using only a few minutes of speech data. We conduct an extensive study using different amounts of data for a new speaker and evaluate the synthesized speech in terms of naturalness and voice/style similarity to the target speaker. We find that fine-tuning a single-speaker TTS model on just 30 minutes of data, can yield comparable performance to a model trained from scratch on more than 27 hours of data for both male and female target speakers.