Emphasis Control for Parallel Neural TTS

Recent parallel neural text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis methods are able to generate speech with high fidelity while maintaining high performance. However, these systems often lack control over the output prosody, thus restricting the semantic information conveyable for a given text. This paper proposes a hierarchical parallel neural TTS system for prosodic emphasis control by learning a latent space that directly corresponds to a change in emphasis. Three candidate features for the latent space are compared: 1) Variance of pitch and duration within words in a sentence, 2) Wavelet-based feature…