End-to-End Speech Synthesis for Tibetan Multidialect

Abstract

The research on Tibetan speech synthesis technology has been mainly focusing on single dialect, and thus there is a lack of research on Tibetan multidialect speech synthesis technology. This paper presents an end-to-end Tibetan multidialect speech synthesis model to realize a speech synthesis system which can be used to synthesize different Tibetan dialects. Firstly, Wylie transliteration scheme is used to convert the Tibetan text into the corresponding Latin letters, which effectively reduces the size of training corpus and the workload of front-end text processing. Secondly, a shared feature prediction network with a cyclic sequence-to-sequence structure is built, which maps the Latin transliteration vector of Tibetan character to Mel spectrograms and learns the relevant features of multidialect speech data. Thirdly, two dialect-specific WaveNet vocoders are combined with the feature prediction network, which synthesizes the Mel spectrum of Lhasa-Ü-Tsang and Amdo pastoral dialect into time-domain waveform, respectively. The model avoids using a large number of Tibetan dialect expertise for processing some time-consuming tasks, such as phonetic analysis and phonological annotation. Additionally, it can directly synthesize Lhasa-Ü-Tsang and Amdo pastoral speech on the existing text annotation. The experimental results show that the synthesized speech of Lhasa-Ü-Tsang and Amdo pastoral dialect based on our proposed method has better clarity and naturalness than the Tibetan monolingual model.