lvl_is_flite

Voice generation for Icelandic Flite voices

Preparation

This section describes where the data for this voice comes from and how it is preprocessed.

Voice data

This repo is intended for use with data from the Talrómur corpus, and in particular the first voice; lvl_is_f is created using voice f, named Álfur therein. The corpus is described in these two papers: [1]: script design [2]: recording and verification There are 2 primary voice-specific files in this voice build. They are, relative to the voice directory:

• etc/txt.done.data, which contains normalized prompts with inserted phrasing tags
• festvox/lexicon.scm which contains a mix of manual and automatic g2p transcriptions of all words that occur in the source data.

For the initial voice, the Grammatek TTS frontend was used with phrasing enabled, but as of yet this is a very time consuming step. The phrasing step can optionally be skipped to greatly speed things up, in which case pause tags are only inserted where punctuation is present in the prompts.

Due to serious limitations of Flite in terms of handling phoneme names, we use a modified version of SAMPA, which does not use underscores, digits or colons.

See mapping from standard SAMPA to our modified version

SAMPA	flite phoneset
a:	aa
a	a
ai:	aii
ai	ai
au:	auu
au	au
c	c
C	C
c_h	ch
D	D
ei:	eii
ei	ei
E:	EE
E	E
f	f
G	G
h	h
i:	ii
i	i
I:	II
I	I
j	j
k_h	kh
k	k
l	l
l_0	lz
m	m
m_0	mz
n	n
n_0	nz
J	J
J_0	Jz
N	N
N_0	Nz
9:	oee
9	oe
9i:	oeii
9i	oei
ou:	ouu
ou	ou
O:	OO
Oi	Oi
O	O
p_h	ph
p	p
r	r
r_0	rz
s	s
t_h	th
t	t
u:	uu
u	u
v	v
x	x
Y:	YY
Yi	Yi
Y	Y
T	T

In addition to these SAMPA phonemes, the token pau is used to indicate silence at the phone level, whereas <sil> is used at the word level.

When generating <voice_dir>/festvox/lexicon.scm this mapping needs to be (as of yet, manually) applied to the outputs after the G2P step is run.

Dependencies

The voice build relies on a few core toolkits, which each have their own installation instructions.

• Edinburgh Speech Tools
• Festvox
• Festival
• And finally, a modified version of CMU Flite In addition, we use the Grammatek TTS frontend to perform phrasing and Grapheme-to-phoneme(G2P) conversion

The modified CMU Flite contains a partial integration for Icelandic TTS Frontend processing. The integration was partially performed following instructions from the official Flite documentation. However, since the documentation is incomplete and following the instructions therein does not produce a working voice, we based parts of the code on the CMU lexicon integration bundled within Flite. Since the Flite integration is intended for use in an Android TTS engine where frontend processing is done elsewhere, only parts required by the voice build process were implemented and some essential parts of the TTS frontend were left unimplemented, most notably word syllabification.

Environment variables

The build process expects certain environment variables to be set. (e.g. using export <VARIABLENAME>=<value> in Linux)

• DATADIR should point to the location of the Talrómur data being used. Specifically, the directory containing an index.tsv file and an audio/ subdirectory for the desired voice
• FLITEDIR should point to where the Flite source code is located. e.g. ~/Flite if you clone the Flite repo into your home directory.
• Likewise, FESTIVALDIR, FESTVOXDIR and ESTDIR should point to the locations of Festival, Festvox and Edinburgh Speech Tools, respectively.

Resulting voice models and usage

This recipe generates two nearly identical voice models, one which can be run within Festival, and another standalone voice using Flite. These voice models are generated by running the <voice_dir>/create_voice.sh script after following the preparation instructions above.

The Festival voice can be used by supplying -eval <voice_dir>/festvox/<voicename>_clunits.scm -eval '(voice_<voicename>_clunits)' when invoking festival binaries such as ${FESTIVALDIR}/bin/text2wave. Note that text2wave also expects a path to a file containing the text to be synthesized as a required argument, and output can be redirected to a file using the -o flag. Example where input.txt contains a text prompt:

$FESTIVALDIR/bin/text2wave -eval lvl_is_f/festvox/lvl_is_f_clunits.scm -eval '(voice_lvl_is_f_clunits)' input.txt -o output.wav

The generated flite voice binary accepts a sequence of phonemes as input, using the -p flag. e.g.

./flite_lvl_is_f -p "C E1 r t n a0 EE1 rz s E1 h t n i0 N k pau s EE1 m T uu1 c aii1 t I0 r n OO1 t a0 T pau" -o output.wav

Called from within the <voice_dir>/flite subdirectory after the voice build, this should generate a synthetic clip of a voice saying "Hérna er setning sem þú gætir notað" in the file output.wav.

As stated above, the word-level token for silence is '' whereas the phone-level token is 'pau'.

Known issues and further development

The voices resulting from this recipe are by no means SOTA voices and have significant limitations, particulary in terms of audible joins. This issue can be caused by 3 potential causes.

• Firstly, the pitch marks (extracted into the <voice_dir>/pm subdirectory) may be incorrectly computed and the extraction script <voice_dir>/bin/make_pm_wave may need tweaking for that particular voice.
• Secondly, the join cost function may have suboptimal parameters. In the festival voice, they are set in <voice_dir>/festvox/<voice_name>_clunits.scm in the case of runtime parameters and in <voice_dir>/festvox/build_clunits.scm in the case of build-time parameters, as the <voice_name>::dt_params variable.
  • In particular, the parameters of note here are f0_join_weight and f0_pen_weight, which denotes the weighting placed upon mismatches in pitch, and join_weights and ac_weights, which correspond to mismatches in f0 and MFCC features on joins. MFCCs roughly correspond to the overall shape of the spectrum at the join points.
  • Other parameters can also be tweaked, they are documented on pages 116-122 of the manual for building synthetic voices by Alan W. Black and Kevin A. Lenzo
  • In Flite, these parameters are stored in the <voicename>_db variable which is set near the bottom of flite/<voicename>_clunits.c
• Thirdly, the waveform join method may be suboptimal. That is set by the join_method parameter in the runtime parameters of Festival.
  • Supported values in festival are windowed, none and modified_lpc.
  • In Flite, only simple_join, which corresponds to none and modified_lpc are implemented, and they are specified in the register_<voicename> function in flite/<voicename>.c, along with other parameters. It can be set by e.g.:

flite_feat_set_string(v->features,"join_type","simple_join");

Modifying the number of input speech samples may also yield different results. Greatly increasing the number of input samples will severely slow down the voice build process as various superlinear algorithms are used. In addition, the voice build process may fail due to stack overflows so care must be taken when doing so. Additionally, the space requirements of the voice will grow linearly with the number of samples, and generation will also be slightly slowed down. Greatly reducing the number of input samples, on the other hand, will result in worse joins, as intuition tells us that when we reduce the number of available units, we also reduce the likelihood of finding a set that matches nicely.

Decreasing the number of samples can be achieved by simply truncating the etc/txt.done.data file for the voice in question, as that file is used to fetch .wav files from the corpus. Increasing the number of samples requires transcribing the additional sentences using the Grammatek TTS frontend as described in the voice data description above. Additionally, the lexicon may need to be expanded with any OOV words the text may contain. Since automatic transcriptions may prove incorrect and thus produce bad units, care must be taken in using them.

The Icelandic language integration into the modified version of Flite is not fully implemented so as of yet the Flite voice only supports phoneme input.

• In particular, a syllabification method is missing, possibly among other things. This causes text processing for full TTS to fail.
• Due to the use case of the Flite voice, this should be acceptable as the Android TTS engine which utilizes the voice performs frontend processing in advance.