Taco-VC: A Single Speaker Tacotron based Voice Conversion with Limited Data

TL;DR

Taco-VC is a voice conversion system that uses a single speaker Tacotron model and minimal data to produce high-quality speech, outperforming some baselines and requiring less resources.

Contribution

The paper presents Taco-VC, a novel single-speaker Tacotron-based voice conversion architecture that adapts with limited data, reducing resource requirements compared to multi-speaker systems.

Findings

Outperforms baseline in VCC 2018 SPOKE task

Achieves competitive results with less data

Uses a speech enhancement network to improve quality

Abstract

This paper introduces Taco-VC, a novel architecture for voice conversion based on Tacotron synthesizer, which is a sequence-to-sequence with attention model. The training of multi-speaker voice conversion systems requires a large number of resources, both in training and corpus size. Taco-VC is implemented using a single speaker Tacotron synthesizer based on Phonetic PosteriorGrams (PPGs) and a single speaker WaveNet vocoder conditioned on mel spectrograms. To enhance the converted speech quality, and to overcome over-smoothing, the outputs of Tacotron are passed through a novel speechenhancement network, which is composed of a combination of the phoneme recognition and Tacotron networks. Our system is trained just with a single speaker corpus and adapts to new speakers using only a few minutes of training data. Using mid-size public datasets, our method outperforms the baseline in the VCC 2018 SPOKE non-parallel voice conversion task and achieves competitive results compared to multi-speaker networks trained on large private datasets.