While neural text-to-speech (TTS) has achieved human-like natural synthetic speech, multilingual TTS systems are limited to resource-rich languages due to the need for paired text and studio-quality audio data. This paper proposes a method for zero-shot multilingual TTS using text-only data for the target language. The use of text-only data allows the development of TTS systems for low-resource languages for which only textual resources are available, making TTS accessible to thousands of languages. Inspired by the strong cross-lingual transferability of multilingual language models, our framework first performs masked language model pretraining with multilingual text-only data. Then we train this model with a paired data in a supervised manner, while freezing a language-aware embedding layer. This allows inference even for languages not included in the paired data but present in the text-only data. Evaluation results demonstrate highly intelligible zero-shot TTS with a character error rate of less than 12% for an unseen language. All experiments were conducted using public datasets and the implementation will be made available for reproducibility.

使用零样本学习和多语言语言模型，该研究提出了一种只使用目标语言文本数据进行多语言语音合成（TTS）的方法，其能够成功地为只有文本资源的低资源语言开发TTS系统，大大拓展了TTS的覆盖范围并能取得高度理解度。

从文本学会说话：无监督文本预训练的零射多语言语音合成