A high quality text-to-speech system composed of multiple neural networks

Abstract

While neural networks have been employed to handle several different text-to-speech tasks, ours is the first system to use neural networks throughout, for both linguistic and acoustic processing. We divide the text-to-speech task into three subtasks, a linguistic module mapping from text to a linguistic representation, an acoustic module mapping from the linguistic representation to speech, and a video module mapping from the linguistic representation to animated images. The linguistic module employs a letter-to-sound neural network and postlexical neural network. The acoustic module employs a duration neural network and a phonetic neural network. The visual neural network is employed in parallel to the acoustic module to drive a talking head. The use of neural networks that can be retrained on the characteristics of different voices and languages affords our system a degree of adaptability and naturalness heretofore unavailable.