ISCA Archive Blizzard 2021
ISCA Archive Blizzard 2021

The CPQD-Unicamp system for Blizzard Challenge 2021

Mário Uliani Neto, Flávio O. Simões, Fernando O. Runstein, Edson J. Nagle, Bianca Dal Bó, Lucas H. Ueda, Paula D. P. Costa

This paper presents the CPQD-UNICAMP text-to-speech system for Blizzard Challenge 2021. The system consists of a bilingual linguistic front-end, an acoustic model based on Tacotron2 and a Parallel Wavegan neural vocoder. A multi-speaker Brazilian Portuguese dataset was added to the Blizzard 2021 dataset in order to train a bilingual acoustic model. The system was later fine-tuned with the target speaker data. Sentences were classified according to the punctuation type and a specialized model was trained for each category to better model the intonation pattern of non-declarative sentences. The Blizzard Challenge evaluation for the hub task shows that the proposed strategy achieved high naturalness, intelligibility and similarity results.