Sample Efficient Adaptive Text-to-Speech

Yutian Chen, Yannis Assael, Brendan Shillingford, David Budden, Scott Reed, Heiga Zen, Quan Wang, Luis C. Cobo, Andrew Trask, Ben Laurie, Caglar Gulcehre, Aäron van den Oord, Oriol Vinyals, Nando de Freitas

We present a meta-learning approach for adaptive text-to-speech (TTS) with few data. During training, we learn a multi-speaker model using a shared conditional WaveNet core and independent learned embeddings for each speaker. The aim of training is not to produce a neural network with fixed weights, which is then deployed as a TTS system. Instead, the aim is to produce a network that requires few data at deployment time to rapidly adapt to new speakers. We introduce and benchmark three strategies: (i) learning the speaker embedding while keeping the WaveNet core fixed, (ii) fine-tuning the entire architecture with stochastic gradient descent, and (iii) predicting the speaker embedding with a trained neural network encoder. The experiments show that these approaches are successful at adapting the multi-speaker neural network to new speakers, obtaining state-of-the-art results in both sample naturalness and voice similarity with merely a few minutes of audio data from new speakers.