The Blue Lagoon

The Blue Lagoon

"The Blue Lagoon is a 1980 American romance and adventure film directed by Randal Kleiser"

This phrase is stuck in my head. Not because I'm a huge fan of poorly rated movies, but because it's a test phrase that Google likes to use to show off its speech synthesis algorithms. Speech synthesis has kinda been stuck in my head too.

Tacotron Yum

Recently, researchers at Google published a paper describing a text-to-speech generation model called “Tacotron”. It uses deep learning to learn how to generate audio based on input text. Besides catching my attention due to the delicious sounding title, the paper intrigued me because of the problems that arise when trying to synthesize speech from text. Current speech synthesis models in production rely primarily on concatenation of pre-recorded words, with some smoothing to make the words flow together more. The problem with this method is that the length of words and intonation are not taken fully into consideration, causing the synthesized audio to sound robotic and unnatural.

Synthesizing speech is a non-trivial problem, mainly because there is a lot of interpolation involved. Raw text does not provide a lot of clues for the tone, inflection, and expressiveness. The inflection in asking a question, such as "It's your birthay today?", is significantly different from that in a statement such as "It's your birthday today!" In addition, individual voices, obviously, differ by a lot, based on gender, nationality, etc. It's hard to teach a computer to generalize the important parts.

Tacotron takes a different approach from the current concatenative methods: it uses an “end-to-end” approach, wherein it learns from text/speech pairs to determine how to directly generate the raw spectrogram given an input text. This allows for it to include features such as a natural rhythm of speech, incorporate stress and intonation. The strength of a deep learning model is that it can naturally incorporate features that may otherwise go overlooked. Since it learns from recordings, for example, and uses that to generate speech, the generated audio also includes mouth-sounds and breathing that make the speech sound more human.

Speech synthesis is an incredibly relevant application of computer science, which is why I found the topic so interesting. Text to speech could be used to automatically generate audiobooks, create dialogue procedurally, and provide accurate verbal translations. Personal assistant applications that use a conversational interface would require natural speech synthesis for a more immersive user experience.

Additional Reading

You can read the Tacotron paper here (arxiv 1703.10135).

You can read about another one of Google's speech synthesis projects, WaveNet, here (website) or here (paper; arxiv 1609.03499).