The FruitShell French synthesis system at the Blizzard 2023 Challenge

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Main Authors: Qi, Xin, Wang, Xiaopeng, Wang, Zhiyong, Liu, Wang, Ding, Mingming, Shi, Shuchen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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_version_ 1866917785775374336
author Qi, Xin
Wang, Xiaopeng
Wang, Zhiyong
Liu, Wang
Ding, Mingming
Shi, Shuchen
author_facet Qi, Xin
Wang, Xiaopeng
Wang, Zhiyong
Liu, Wang
Ding, Mingming
Shi, Shuchen
contents This paper presents a French text-to-speech synthesis system for the Blizzard Challenge 2023. The challenge consists of two tasks: generating high-quality speech from female speakers and generating speech that closely resembles specific individuals. Regarding the competition data, we conducted a screening process to remove missing or erroneous text data. We organized all symbols except for phonemes and eliminated symbols that had no pronunciation or zero duration. Additionally, we added word boundary and start/end symbols to the text, which we have found to improve speech quality based on our previous experience. For the Spoke task, we performed data augmentation according to the competition rules. We used an open-source G2P model to transcribe the French texts into phonemes. As the G2P model uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), we applied the same transcription process to the provided competition data for standardization. However, due to compiler limitations in recognizing special symbols from the IPA chart, we followed the rules to convert all phonemes into the phonetic scheme used in the competition data. Finally, we resampled all competition audio to a uniform sampling rate of 16 kHz. We employed a VITS-based acoustic model with the hifigan vocoder. For the Spoke task, we trained a multi-speaker model and incorporated speaker information into the duration predictor, vocoder, and flow layers of the model. The evaluation results of our system showed a quality MOS score of 3.6 for the Hub task and 3.4 for the Spoke task, placing our system at an average level among all participating teams.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_00223
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The FruitShell French synthesis system at the Blizzard 2023 Challenge
Qi, Xin
Wang, Xiaopeng
Wang, Zhiyong
Liu, Wang
Ding, Mingming
Shi, Shuchen
Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Sound
This paper presents a French text-to-speech synthesis system for the Blizzard Challenge 2023. The challenge consists of two tasks: generating high-quality speech from female speakers and generating speech that closely resembles specific individuals. Regarding the competition data, we conducted a screening process to remove missing or erroneous text data. We organized all symbols except for phonemes and eliminated symbols that had no pronunciation or zero duration. Additionally, we added word boundary and start/end symbols to the text, which we have found to improve speech quality based on our previous experience. For the Spoke task, we performed data augmentation according to the competition rules. We used an open-source G2P model to transcribe the French texts into phonemes. As the G2P model uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), we applied the same transcription process to the provided competition data for standardization. However, due to compiler limitations in recognizing special symbols from the IPA chart, we followed the rules to convert all phonemes into the phonetic scheme used in the competition data. Finally, we resampled all competition audio to a uniform sampling rate of 16 kHz. We employed a VITS-based acoustic model with the hifigan vocoder. For the Spoke task, we trained a multi-speaker model and incorporated speaker information into the duration predictor, vocoder, and flow layers of the model. The evaluation results of our system showed a quality MOS score of 3.6 for the Hub task and 3.4 for the Spoke task, placing our system at an average level among all participating teams.
title The FruitShell French synthesis system at the Blizzard 2023 Challenge
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00223