We present Deep Voice, a production-quality text-to-speech system constructed entirely from deep neural networks. Deep Voice lays the groundwork for truly end-to-end neural speech synthesis. The system comprises five major building blocks: a segmentation model for locating phoneme boundaries, a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion model, a phoneme duration prediction model, a fundamental frequency prediction model, and an audio synthesis model. For the segmentation model, we propose a novel way of performing phoneme boundary detection with deep neural networks using connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss. For the audio synthesis model, we implement a variant of WaveNet that requires fewer parameters and trains faster than the original. By using a neural network for each component, our system is simpler and more flexible than traditional text-to-speech systems, where each component requires laborious feature engineering and extensive domain expertise. Finally, we show that inference with our system can be performed faster than real time and describe optimized WaveNet inference kernels on both CPU and GPU that achieve up to 400x speedups over existing implementations.

Deep Voice是一个使用深度神经网络构建的优秀的文本到语音系统，由五个主要组成部分构成，包括用于定位语音边界的分段模型、字素到音素转换模型、音素持续时间预测模型、基频预测模型和音频合成模型。通过使用神经网络进行每个组件的构建，既简单又灵活。此外，我们通过优化后的WaveNet推断内核，实现了400倍的实时速度。

深度之声：实时神经文本转语音