ISCA Archive Blizzard 2023
ISCA Archive Blizzard 2023

The Idiap Speech Synthesis System for the Blizzard Challenge 2023

Haolin Chen, Mutian He, Louise Coppieters de Gibson, Philip N. Garner

This paper presents the text-to-speech (TTS) system submitted by Idiap Research Institute to the Blizzard Challenge 2023. Our system follows the conventional pipeline of text analysis, acoustic modeling (AM) and vocoding. For text analysis, open-source pretrained part-of-speech (POS) taggers and lemmatizers are utilized to provide more accurate grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion on top of the eSpeak backend. The rest of the system incorporates a fully diffusion-based approach which comprises a diffusion transformer-based acoustic model and FastDiff as the vocoder, both of which are trained only on the provided data to ensure high-quality synthesis. Our entry provides a baseline for the cascading diffusion AM-vocoder architecture since no extra design is adopted to enhance the naturalness of speech. Evaluation results have demonstrated high synthesis quality of our system and the effectiveness of the proposed phonemization pipeline.