Neural Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Book excerpt: Text-to-speech (TTS) aims to synthesize intelligible and natural speech based on the given text. It is a hot topic in language, speech, and machine learning research and has broad applications in industry. This book introduces neural network-based TTS in the era of deep learning, aiming to provide a good understanding of neural TTS, current research and applications, and the future research trend. This book first introduces the history of TTS technologies and overviews neural TTS, and provides preliminary knowledge on language and speech processing, neural networks and deep learning, and deep generative models. It then introduces neural TTS from the perspective of key components (text analyses, acoustic models, vocoders, and end-to-end models) and advanced topics (expressive and controllable, robust, model-efficient, and data-efficient TTS). It also points some future research directions and collects some resources related to TTS. This book is the first to introduce neural TTS in a comprehensive and easy-to-understand way and can serve both academic researchers and industry practitioners working on TTS.