Into-TTS : Intonation Template based Prosody Control System
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Intonations take an important role in delivering the intention of the speaker. However, current end-to-end TTS systems often fail to model proper intonations. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel, intuitive method to synthesize speech in different intonations using predefined intonation templates. Prior to the acoustic model training, speech data are automatically grouped into intonation templates by k-means clustering, according to their sentence-final F0 contour. Two proposed modules are added to the end-to-end TTS framework: intonation classifier and intonation encoder. The intonation classifier recommends a suitable intonation template to the given text. The intonation encoder, attached to the text encoder output, synthesizes speech abiding the requested intonation template. Main contributions of our paper are: (a) an easy-to-use intonation control system covering a wide range of users; (b) better performance in wrapping speech in a requested intonation with improved pitch distance and MOS; and (c) feasibility to future integration between TTS and NLP, TTS being able to utilize contextual information. Audio samples are available at https://srtts.github.io/IntoTTS.
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