Towards General-Purpose Text-Instruction-Guided Voice Conversion
Journal
2023 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, ASRU 2023
ISBN
9798350306897
Date Issued
2023-01-01
Author(s)
Kuan, Chun Yi
Li, Chen An
Hsu, Tsu Yuan
Lin, Tse Yang
Chung, Ho Lam
Chang, Kai Wei
Chang, Shuo Yiin
Abstract
This paper introduces a novel voice conversion (VC) model, guided by text instructions such as 'articulate slowly with a deep tone' or 'speak in a cheerful boyish voice'. Unlike traditional methods that rely on reference utterances to determine the attributes of the converted speech, using text instruction adds versatility and specificity to voice conversion. The proposed VC model is a neural codec language model which processes a sequence of discrete codes, resulting in the code sequence of converted speech. It utilizes text instructions as style prompts to modify the prosody and emotional information of the given speech. In contrast to previous approaches, which often rely on employing separate encoders like prosody and content encoders to handle different aspects of the source speech, our model handles various information of speech in an end-to-end manner. Experiments have demonstrated the impressive capabilities of our model in comprehending instructions and delivering reasonable results1
Subjects
Neural audio codec | Style transformation | Voice conversion
SDGs
Type
conference paper