Artificial Neural Networks in Swedish Speech Synthesis

Abstract: Text-to-speech (TTS) systems have entered our daily lives in the form of smart assistants and many other applications. Contemporary re- search applies machine learning and artificial neural networks (ANNs) to synthesize speech. It has been shown that these systems outperform the older concatenative and parametric methods. In this paper, ANN-based methods for speech synthesis are ex- plored and one of the methods is implemented for the Swedish lan- guage. The implemented method is dubbed “Tacotron” and is a first step towards end-to-end ANN-based TTS which puts many differ- ent ANN-techniques to work. The resulting system is compared to a parametric TTS through a strength-of-preference test that is carried out with 20 Swedish speaking subjects. A statistically significant pref- erence for the ANN-based TTS is found. Test subjects indicate that the ANN-based TTS performs better than the parametric TTS when it comes to audio quality and naturalness but sometimes lacks in intelli- gibility.