Natural Speech Technology

Project: Research

Renals, Stephen (Principal Investigator)
King, Simon (Co-investigator)

Status	Finished
Effective start/end date	1/05/11 → 31/07/16

Total award	£7,650,991.00
Funding organisation	EPSRC
Funder project reference	ep/i031022/1

Period	1/05/11 → 31/07/16

Datasets

Activities

Controllable and adaptable statistical parametric speech synthesis
Activity: Academic talk or presentation types › Invited talk
ICPhS 2015 keynote: What speech synthesis can do for you (and what you can do for speech synthesis)
Activity: Academic talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Neural Networks for Distant Speech Recognition
Activity: Academic talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Learning representations of speech in neural network acoustic models
Activity: Academic talk or presentation types › Invited talk
EACL 2014 keynote: Speech synthesis needs YOU!
Activity: Academic talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Sunday Morning With...
Activity: Other activity types › Types of Public engagement and outreach - Media article or participation

Press/Media

Interview with Professor Steve Renals on project to improve talking gadgets
Press/Media: Research
Prof Steve Renals leads project to improve talking gadgets
Press/Media: Research
Prof Simon King and Dr Philipa Rewaj discuss the Speak:Unique project
Press/Media: Public Engagement Activities

Research outputs

Reconstructing Voices within the Multiple-Average-Voice-Model framework
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Multi-frame factorisation for long-span acoustic modelling
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Human vs Machine Spoofing Detection on Wideband and Narrowband Data
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Determining the number of speakers in a meeting using microphone array features
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
On the effect of SNR and superdirective beamforming in speaker diarisation in meetings
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Improving Lightly Supervised Training for Broadcast Transcriptions
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
The Sheffield Wargames Corpus.
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Fast, low-artifact speech synthesis considering global variance
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Noise adaptive training for subspace Gaussian mixture models
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Noise Compensation for Subspace Gaussian Mixture Models.
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
A Comparative Study of Adaptive, Automatic recognition of Disordered Speech
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Transcription of multi-genre media archives using out-of-domain data
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Description of the UEDIN System for German ASR
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
The UEDIN ASR Systems for the IWSLT 2014 Evaluation
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Towards Personalized Synthesized Voices for Individuals with Vocal Disabilities: Voice Banking and Reconstruction
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
A Lattice-based Approach to Automatic Filled Pause Insertion
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
The Temporal Delay Hypothesis: Natural, Vocoded and Synthetic Speech
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Combining a Vector Space Representation of Linguistic Context with a Deep Neural Network for Text-To-Speech Synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Learning Hidden Unit Contributions for Unsupervised Speaker Adaptation of Neural Network Acoustic Models
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Speech Synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Investigating Automatic & Human Filled Pause Insertion for Speech Synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Measuring a decade of progress in Text-to-Speech
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Investigating the shortcomings of HMM synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Joint Uncertainty Decoding with Unscented Transform for Noise Robust Subspace Gaussian Mixture Models
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
homeService: Voice-enabled assistive technology in the home using cloud-based automatic speech recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
The NST–GlottHMM entry to the Blizzard Challenge 2015
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Waveform generation based on signal reshaping for statistical parametric speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Synthesising Filled Pauses: Representation and Datamixing
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Median-based generation of synthetic speech durations using a non-parametric approach
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Using eigenvoices and nearest-neighbours in HMM-based cross-lingual speaker adaptation with limited data
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Investigation of Using Continuous Representation of Various Linguistic Units in Neural Network Based Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Enhance the Word Vector with Prosodic Information for the Recurrent Neural Network Based TTS System
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
A Hierarchical Predictor of Synthetic Speech Naturalness Using Neural Networks
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Analysis of the Voice Conversion Challenge 2016 Evaluation Results
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Development of a statistical parametric synthesis system for operatic singing in German
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Multidimensional scaling of systems in the Voice Conversion Challenge 2016
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Investigating RNN-based speech enhancement methods for noise-robust Text-to-Speech
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Learning Hidden Unit Contributions for Unsupervised Acoustic Model Adaptation
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
A deep auto-encoder based low-dimensional feature extraction from FFT spectral envelopes for statistical parametric speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Hybrid acoustic models for distant and multichannel large vocabulary speech recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
A perceptually-motivated low-complexity instantaneous linear channel normalization technique applied to speaker verification
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Voice Banking and Voice Reconstruction for MND patients
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Cross-Lingual Subspace Gaussian Mixture Models for Low-Resource Speech Recognition
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Smooth talking: articulatory join costs for unit selection
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Evaluating comprehension of natural and synthetic conversational speech
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Simplified Learning Using Binary Orthogonal Constraints
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Cross-Lingual Adaptation with Multi-Task Adaptive Networks
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Speaker Recognition Anti-spoofing
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
Towards minimum perceptual error training for DNN-based speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Voice source modelling using deep neural networks for statistical parametric speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Soft context clustering for F0 modeling in HMM-based speech synthesis
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Asynchronous factorisation of speaker and background with feature transforms in speech recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Lightly Supervised Discriminative Training of Grapheme Models for Improved Sentence-level Alignment of Speech and Text Data
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Automatic Transcription of Multi-genre Media Archives
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
The UEDIN English ASR System for the IWSLT 2013 Evaluation
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
The CSTR entry to the Blizzard Challenge 2016
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis with Bottleneck Features for Speech Recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Differentiable pooling for unsupervised speaker adaptation
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
A Flexible Front-End for HTS
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Feature-space Speaker Adaptation for Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis Acoustic Models
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Modelling acoustic feature dependencies with artificial neural networks: Trajectory-RNADE
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Dysarthria Intelligibility Assessment in a Factor Analysis Total Variability Space
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
A lecture transcription system combining neural network acoustic and language models
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Revisiting semi-continuous hidden Markov models
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Using Bayesian Networks to find relevant context features for HMM-based speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Factorized context modelling for Text-to-Speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Evaluation of Speaker Verification Security and Detection of HMM-Based Synthetic Speech
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Multitask learning of context-dependent targets in deep neural network acoustic models
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Deep neural networks employing multi-task learning and stacked bottleneck features for speech synthesis.
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Anti-Spoofing for Text-Independent Speaker Verification: An Initial Database, Comparison of Countermeasures, and Human Performance
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
A Deep Generative Architecture for Postfiltering in Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
The MGB Challenge: Evaluating Multi-Genre Broadcast Media Recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Sentence-level control vectors for deep neural network speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Are we using enough listeners? No! An empirically-supported critique of Interspeech 2014 TTS evaluations
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Maximum a posteriori adaptation of subspace Gaussian mixture models for cross-lingual speech recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Multilingual training of deep neural networks
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Speech and Audio Signal Processing: Processing and Perception of Speech and Music
Research output: Book/Report › Book
Neural net word representations for phrase-break prediction without a part of speech tagger
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Multiple-average-voice-based speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Unsupervised Adaptation of Recurrent Neural Network Language Models
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
The NII speech synthesis entry for Blizzard Challenge 2016
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Small-footprint Deep Neural Networks with Highway Connections for Speech Recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Intelligibility enhancement of HMM-generated speech in additive noise by modifying Mel cepstral coefficients to increase the glimpse proportion
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Deep neural network-guided unit selection synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Using linguistic predictability and the Lombard effect to increase the intelligibility of synthetic speech in noise
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Lightly supervised learning from a damaged natural speech corpus
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Multi-level adaptive networks in tandem and hybrid ASR systems
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Analysis of Speaker Clustering Strategies for HMM-Based Speech Synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
The UEDIN system for the IWSLT 2012 evaluation
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Intelligibility Enhancement of Speech in Noise
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
A reading list of recent advances in speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Disfluencies in change detection in natural, vocoded and synthetic speech
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Speech Synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed)
Studio report: Linux audio for multi-speaker natural speech technology.
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
End-to-end neural segmental models for speech recognition
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Parallel and cascaded deep neural networks for text-to-speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Syllable-Level Representations of Suprasegmental Features for DNN-Based Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
GlottDNN - A full-band glottal vocoder for statistical parametric speech synthesis
Research output: Contribution to conference › Paper
Neural networks for distant speech recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
ASVspoof: the Automatic Speaker Verification Spoofing and Countermeasures Challenge
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
A Comparative Study of the Performance of HMM, DNN, and RNN based Speech Synthesis Systems Trained on Very Large Speaker-Dependent Corpora
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Robust TTS Duration Modelling Using DNNs
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
From HMMs to DNNs: Where Do the Improvements Come From?
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Sequence-discriminative training of deep neural networks
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Unsupervised cross-lingual knowledge transfer in DNN-based LVCSR
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Generating exact lattices in the WFST framework
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Cross-domain Paraphrasing For Improving Language Modelling Using Out-of-domain Data
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Merlin: An Open Source Neural Network Speech Synthesis System
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Investigating Very Deep Highway Networks for Parametric Speech Synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Differentiable Pooling for Unsupervised Acoustic Model Adaptation
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
The Effect of Filled Pauses and Speaking Rate on Speech Comprehension in Natural, Vocoded and Synthetic Speech
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
A system for automatic broadcast news summarisation, geolocation and translation
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Deep neural network context embeddings for model selection in rich-context HMM synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Convolutional Neural Networks for Distant Speech Recognition
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Grapheme and multilingual posterior features for under-resourced speech recognition: a study on Scottish Gaelic
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Speech Enhancement for a Noise-Robust Text-to-Speech Synthesis System using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Complementary tasks for context-dependent deep neural network acoustic models
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
A study of speaker adaptation for DNN-based speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Distant Speech Recognition Experiments Using the AMI Corpus
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed)
A system for automatic alignment of broadcast media captions using weighted finite-state transducers
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
SAT-LHUC: Speaker adaptive training for learning hidden unit contributions
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Combining Vocal Tract Length Normalization With Hierarchical Linear Transformations
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
SAS: A Speaker Verification Spoofing Database Containing Diverse Attacks
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
The Voice Conversion Challenge 2016
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Measuring the Perceptual Effects of Modelling Assumptions in Speech Synthesis Using Stimuli Constructed from Repeated Natural Speech
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Regularization of context-dependent deep neural networks with context-independent multi-task training
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Acoustic Data-driven Pronunciation Lexicon for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Blind Speech Segmentation using Spectrogram Image-based Features and Mel Cepstral Coefficients
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
The use of articulatory movement data in speech synthesis applications: An overview — Application of articulatory movements using machine learning algorithms
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Artificial Personality and Disfluency
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Knowledge Distillation for Small-footprint Highway Networks
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Using Text and Acoustic Features in Predicting Glottal Excitation Waveforms for Parametric Speech Synthesis with Recurrent Neural Networks
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Just-in-time prepared captioning for live transmissions
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Segmental Recurrent Neural Networks for End-to-end Speech Recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
A Study of the Recurrent Neural Network Encoder-Decoder for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Rating Naturalness in Speech Synthesis: The Effect of Style and Expectation
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis for Acoustic Modeling
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
SPECS - an embedded platform, speech-driven environmental control system evaluated in a virtuous circle framework
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Speech Enhancement of Noisy and Reverberant Speech for Text-to-Speech
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
An introduction to statistical parametric speech synthesis
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Joint Uncertainty Decoding for Noise Robust Subspace Gaussian Mixture Models
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Speech Synthesis Based on Hidden Markov Models
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Glottal spectral separation for speech synthesis
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Small-footprint highway deep neural networks for speech recognition
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Top-down Tree Long Short-Term Memory Networks
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Investigating gated recurrent neural networks for speech synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
On training the recurrent neural network encoder-decoder for large vocabulary end-to-end speech recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Structured Output Layer with Auxiliary Targets for Context-Dependent Acoustic Modelling
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
ASVspoof 2015: the First Automatic Speaker Verification Spoofing and Countermeasures Challenge
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Combining in-domain and out-of-domain speech data for automatic recognition of disordered speech
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Learning speaker-specific pronunciations of disordered speech
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Testing the Consistency Assumption: Pronunciation Variant Forced Alignment in Read and Spontaneous Speech Synthesis
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Speech synthesis technologies for individuals with vocal disabilities: Voice banking and reconstruction
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Autoregressive Models for Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
Regularized subspace Gaussian mixture models for cross-lingual speech recognition
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Revisiting Hybrid and GMM-HMM system combination techniques
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution