SpeedySpeech [Paper link]

While recent neural sequence-to-sequence models have greatly improved the quality of speech synthesis, there has not been a system capable of fast training, fast inference and high-quality audio synthesis at the same time. We propose a student-teacher network capable of high-quality faster-than-real-time spectrogram synthesis, with low requirements on computational resources and fast training time. We show that self-attention layers are not necessary for generation of high quality audio. We utilize simple convolutional blocks with residual connections in both student and teacher networks and use only a single attention layer in the teacher model. Coupled with a MelGAN vocoder, our model's voice quality was rated significantly higher than Tacotron2. Our model can be efficiently trained on a single GPU and can run in real time even on a CPU.

Listen to our audio samples here.

Installation instructions

The code was tested with python 3.7.3, cuda 10.0.130 and GNU bash 5.0.3 on Ubuntu 19.04.

git clone https://github.com/janvainer/speedyspeech.git
cd speedyspeech

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Inference

1. Download pretrained MelGAN checkpoint

wget -O checkpoints/melgan.pth \
    https://github.com/seungwonpark/melgan/releases/download/v0.1-alpha/nvidia_tacotron2_LJ11_epoch3200.pt 

2. Download pretrained SpeedySpeech checkpoint from the latest release.

wget -O checkpoints/speedyspeech.pth \
    https://github.com/janvainer/speedyspeech/releases/download/v0.2/speedyspeech.pth 

3. Run inference

mkdir synthesized_audio
printf "One sentence. \nAnother sentence.\n" | python code/inference.py --audio_folder synthesized_audio

The model treats each line of input as an item in a batch. To specify different checkpoints, what device to run on etc. use the following:

printf "One sentence. \nAnother sentence.\n" | python code/inference.py \
    --speedyspeech_checkpoint <speedyspeech_checkpoint> \
    --melgan_checkpoint <melgan_checkpoint> \
    --audio_folder synthesized_audio \
    --device cuda

Files wil be added to the audio folder. The model does not handle numbers. please write everything in words. The list of allowed symbols is specified in code/hparam.py.

4. Run inference server

• Place SpeedySpeech and MelGAN checkpoints in the checkpoints folder.

checkpoints/
    melgan.pth
    speedyspeech.pth

And run the following commands. You should be able to open a simple webpage where you can try to synthesize custom sentences.

cd code
python server/app.py  # go to http://127.0.0.1:5000/
python server/app.py --help

    usage: app.py [-h] [--speedyspeech_checkpoint SPEEDYSPEECH_CHECKPOINT]
        [--melgan_checkpoint MELGAN_CHECKPOINT] [--device DEVICE]

    optional arguments:
      -h, --help            show this help message and exit
      --speedyspeech_checkpoint SPEEDYSPEECH_CHECKPOINT
                            Checkpoint file for speedyspeech model
      --melgan_checkpoint MELGAN_CHECKPOINT
                            Checkpoint file for MelGan.
      --device DEVICE       What device to use.

Training

To train speedyspeech, durations of phonemes are needed.

1. Download the LJSpeech dataset and unzip into datasets/data/LJSpeech-1.1

wget -O code/datasets/data/LJSpeech-1.1.tar.bz2 \
    https://data.keithito.com/data/speech/LJSpeech-1.1.tar.bz2
tar xjf code/datasets/data/LJSpeech-1.1.tar.bz2 -C code/datasets/data/

2. Train the duration extraction model

python code/duration_extractor.py -h  # display options
python code/duration_extractor.py \
    --some_option value
tensorboard --logdir=logs

3. Extract durations from the trained model - creates alignments.txt file in the LJSpeech-1.1 folder

python code/extract_durations.py logs/your_checkpoint code/datasets/data/LJSpeech-1.1 \
    --durations_filename my_durations.txt

4. Train SpeedySpeech

python code/speedyspeech.py -h
python code/speedyspeech.py \
    --durations_filename my_durations.txt
tensorboard --logdir=logs2

License

This code is published under the BSD 3-Clause License.

1. code/melgan - MelGAN by Seungwon Park (BSD 3-Clause License)
2. code/utils/stft.py - torch-stft by Prem Seetharaman (BSD 3-Clause License)
3. code/pytorch_ssim - pytorch-ssim by Po-Hsun-Su (MIT)