Laugh Now Cry Later: Controlling Time-Varying Emotional States of Flow-Matching-Based Zero-Shot Text-To-Speech
Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: People change their tones of voice, often accompanied by nonverbal vocalizations (NVs) such as laughter and cries, to convey rich emotions. However, most text-to-speech (TTS) systems lack the capability to generate speech with rich emotions, including NVs. This paper introduces EmoCtrl-TTS, an emotion-controllable zeroshot TTS that can generate highly emotional speech with NVs for any speaker. EmoCtrl-TTS leverages arousal and valence values, as well as laughter embeddings, to condition the flow-matchingbased zero-shot TTS. To achieve high-quality emotional speech generation, EmoCtrl-TTS is trained using more than 27,000 hours of expressive data curated based on pseudo-labeling. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that EmoCtrl-TTS excels in mimicking the emotions of audio prompts in speech-to-speech translation scenarios. We also show that EmoCtrl-TTS can capture emotion changes, express strong emotions, and generate various NVs in zero-shot TTS. See https://aka.ms/emoctrl-tts for demo samples.
Authors: Haibin Wu, Xiaofei Wang, Sefik Emre Eskimez, Manthan Thakker, Daniel Tompkins, Chung-Hsien Tsai, Canrun Li, Zhen Xiao, Sheng Zhao, Jinyu Li, Naoyuki Kanda
Institutions: National Taiwan University, Microsoft (United States)
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4406461501