Compact Neural TTS Voices for Accessibility

Contemporary text-to-speech solutions for accessibility applications can typically be classified into two categories: (i) device-based statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) or unit selection (USEL) and (ii) cloud-based neural TTS. SPSS and USEL offer low latency and low disk footprint at the expense of naturalness and audio quality. Cloud-based neural TTS systems provide significantly better audio quality and naturalness but regress in terms of latency and responsiveness, rendering these impractical for real-world applications. More recently, neural TTS models were made deployable to…