Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models

We introduce Seed-TTS, a family of large-scale autoregressive text-to-speech (TTS) models capable of generating speech that is virtually indistinguishable from human speech. Seed-TTS serves as a foundation model for speech generation and excels in speech in-context learning, achieving performance in speaker similarity and naturalness that matches ground truth human speech in both objective and subjective evaluations. With fine-tuning, we achieve even higher subjective scores across these metrics. Seed-TTS offers superior controllability over various speech attributes such as emotion and is capable of generating highly expressive and diverse speech for speakers in the wild. Furthermore, we propose a self-distillation method for speech factorization, as well as a reinforcement learning approach to enhance model robustness, speaker similarity, and controllability. We additionally present a non-autoregressive (NAR) variant of the Seed-TTS model, named $\text{Seed-TTS}_\text{DiT}$, which utilizes a fully diffusion-based architecture. Unlike previous NAR-based TTS systems, $\text{Seed-TTS}_\text{DiT}$ does not depend on pre-estimated phoneme durations and performs speech generation through end-to-end processing. We demonstrate that this variant achieves comparable performance to the language model-based variant and showcase its effectiveness in speech editing. We encourage readers to listen to demos at \url{https://bytedancespeech.github.io/seedtts_tech_report}.

Automatic Prosody Prediction for Chinese Speech Synthesis using BLSTM-RNN and Embedding Features

Prosody affects the naturalness and intelligibility of speech. However, automatic prosody prediction from text for Chinese speech synthesis is still a great challenge and the traditional conditional random fields (CRF) based method always heavily relies on feature engineering. In this paper, we propose to use neural networks to predict prosodic boundary labels directly from Chinese characters without any feature engineering. Experimental results show that stacking feed-forward and bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) recurrent network layers achieves superior performance over the CRF-based method. The embedding features learned from raw text further enhance the performance.