Development and Evaluation of Speech Synthesis System Based on Deep Learning Models

Abstract

This study concentrates on the investigation, development, and evaluation of Text-to-Speech Synthesis systems based on Deep Learning models for the Azerbaijani Language. We have selected and compared state-of-the-art models-Tacotron and Deep Convolutional Text-to-Speech (DC TTS) systems to achieve the most optimal model. Both systems were trained on the 24 h speech dataset of the Azerbaijani language collected and processed from the news website. To analyze the quality and intelligibility of the speech signals produced by two systems, 34 listeners participated in an online survey containing subjective evaluation tests. The results of the study indicated that according to the Mean Opinion Score, Tacotron demonstrated better results for the In-Vocabulary words; however, DC TTS indicated a higher performance of the Out-Of-Vocabulary words synthesis.

Keywords

• text-to-speech synthesis
• Tacotron
• deep convolutional text-to-speech
• evaluation of speech synthesis
• speech quality and intelligibility