UTTS: Unsupervised TTS with Conditional Disentangled Sequential Variational Auto-encoder

In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised text-to-speech (UTTS) framework which does not require text-audio pairs for the TTS acoustic modeling (AM). UTTS is a multi-speaker speech synthesizer developed from the perspective of disentangled speech representation learning. The framework offers a flexible choice of a speaker's duration model, timbre feature (identity) and content for TTS inference. We leverage recent advancements in self-supervised speech representation learning as well as speech synthesis front-end techniques for the system development. Specifically, we utilize a lexicon to map input text to the phoneme sequence, which is expanded to the frame-level forced alignment (FA) with a speaker-dependent duration model. Then, we develop an alignment mapping module that converts the FA to the unsupervised alignment (UA). Finally, a Conditional Disentangled Sequential Variational Auto-encoder (C-DSVAE), serving as the self-supervised TTS AM, takes the predicted UA and a target speaker embedding to generate the mel spectrogram, which is ultimately converted to waveform with a neural vocoder. We show how our method enables speech synthesis without using a paired TTS corpus. Experiments demonstrate that UTTS can synthesize speech of high naturalness and intelligibility measured by human and objective evaluations.