Simple and Effective Unsupervised Speech Synthesis

Abstract

We introduce the first unsupervised speech synthesis system based on a simple, yet effective recipe.The framework leverages recent work in unsupervised speech recognition as well as existing neural-based speech synthesis.Using only unlabeled speech audio and unlabeled text as well as a lexicon, our method enables speech synthesis without the need for a human-labeled corpus.Experiments demonstrate the unsupervised system can synthesize speech similar to a supervised counterpart in terms of naturalness and intelligibility measured by human evaluation.

Topics & Concepts