Google Inc.

Robert Clark

Chun-an Chan

Vincent Wan

Tom Marius Kenter

Tobias Alexander Hawker

A method for representing an intended prosody in synthesized speech includes receiving a text utterance having at least one word, and selecting an utterance embedding for the text utterance. Each word in the text utterance has at least one syllable and each syllable has at least one phoneme. The utterance embedding represents an intended prosody. For each syllable, using the selected utterance embedding, the method also includes: predicting a duration of the syllable by decoding a prosodic syllable embedding for the syllable based on attention by an attention mechanism to linguistic features of each phoneme of the syllable and generating a plurality of fixed-length predicted frames based on the predicted duration for the syllable.

Attention-based clockwork hierarchical variational encoder

A method () for representing an intended prosody in synthesized speech includes receiving a text utterance () having at least one word (), and selecting an utterance embedding () for the text utterance. Each word in the text utterance has at least one syllable () and each syllable has at least one phoneme (). The utterance embedding represents an intended prosody. For each syllable, using the selected utterance embedding, the method also includes: predicting a duration () of the syllable by decoding a prosodic syllable embedding () for the syllable based on attention by an attention mechanism () to linguistic features () of each phoneme of the syllable and generating a plurality of fixed-length predicted frames () based on the predicted duration for the syllable.

A method for generating frame values using a key frame network includes receiving a text utterance having at least one phoneme, and for each respective phoneme of the at least one phoneme, predicting, using a predictive model, a fixed quantity of key frames. Each respective key frame of the fixed quantity of key frames includes a representation of a component of the respective phoneme. The method also includes generating, using the fixed quantity of key frames, a plurality of frame values. Here, each respective frame value of the plurality of frame values is representative of a fixed-duration of audio.

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Hertfordshire, United Kingdom

Robert Clark