Transformer VQ-VAE for Unsupervised Unit Discovery and Speech Synthesis: ZeroSpeech 2020 Challenge

Understand

In this paper, we report our submitted system for the ZeroSpeech 2020 challenge on Track 2019.

• The main theme in this challenge is to build a speech synthesizer without any textual information or phonetic labels.
• In order to tackle those challenges, we build a system that must address two major components such as 1) given speech audio, extract subword units in an unsupervised way and 2) re-synthesize the audio from novel speakers.
• The system also needs to balance the codebook performance between the ABX error rate and the bitrate compression rate.