Expressive speech audio generation for video games

Abstract

This specification describes a computer-implemented method of training a machine-learned speech audio generation system to generate predicted acoustic features for generated speech audio for use in a video game. The training comprises receiving one or more training examples. Each training example comprises: (i) ground-truth acoustic features for speech audio, (ii) speech content data representing speech content of the speech audio, and (iii) speech expression data representing speech expression of the speech audio. Parameters of the machine-learned speech audio generation system are updated by: (i) minimizing a measure of difference between the predicted acoustic features for a training example and the corresponding ground-truth acoustic features of the training example, and (ii) minimizing a measure of difference between the predicted prosodic features for the training example and the corresponding ground-truth prosodic features for the training example.