Text-to-speech synthesis method and system, a method of training a text-to-speech synthesis system, and a method of calculating an expressivity score

Abstract

A method includes receiving text and inputting the received text in a prediction network. The method further includes generating, using the prediction network, speech data. The prediction network comprises a neural network that is trained to generate expressive speech data from text. The neural network is trained by: receiving a first training dataset comprising audio data and corresponding text data; acquiring a respective expressivity score for each audio sample of the audio data; selecting, from the first training dataset, a first subset of training data based on the respective expressivity scores of the audio data in the first training dataset; generating, for the first subset of training data, prediction audio data for the corresponding text data; and comparing the prediction audio data to the audio data of the first subset of training data.