5 papers
Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Tasks and Baseline Systems
Mengjie Qian, Kate Knill, Stefano Banno +4
This paper presents the "Speak & Improve Challenge 2025: Spoken Language Assessment and Feedback" -- a challenge associated with the ISCA SLaTE 2025 Workshop. The goal of the chall…
A Comparative Analysis of Pretrained Language Models for Text-to-Speech
Marcel Granero-Moya, Penny Karanasou, Sri Karlapati +4
State-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) systems have utilized pretrained language models (PLMs) to enhance prosody and create more natural-sounding speech. However, while PLMs have b…
Controllable Emphasis with zero data for text-to-speech
Arnaud Joly, Marco Nicolis, Ekaterina Peterova +11
We present a scalable method to produce high quality emphasis for text-to-speech (TTS) that does not require recordings or annotations. Many TTS models include a phoneme duration m…
Simple and Effective Multi-sentence TTS with Expressive and Coherent Prosody
Peter Makarov, Ammar Abbas, Mateusz Łajszczak +5
Generating expressive and contextually appropriate prosody remains a challenge for modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems. This is particularly evident for long, multi-sentence inputs…
CopyCat2: A Single Model for Multi-Speaker TTS and Many-to-Many Fine-Grained Prosody Transfer
Sri Karlapati, Penny Karanasou, Mateusz Lajszczak +7
In this paper, we present CopyCat2 (CC2), a novel model capable of: a) synthesizing speech with different speaker identities, b) generating speech with expressive and contextually…