Faces that Speak: Jointly Synthesising Talking Face and Speech from Text

The goal of this work is to simultaneously generate natural talking faces and speech outputs from text. We achieve this by integrating Talking Face Generation (TFG) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems into a unified framework. We address the main challenges of each task: (1) generating a range of head poses representative of real-world scenarios, and (2) ensuring voice consistency despite variations in facial motion for the same identity. To tackle these issues, we introduce a motion sampler based on conditional flow matching, which is capable of high-quality motion code generation in an efficient way. Moreover, we introduce a novel conditioning method for the TTS system, which utilises motion-removed features from the TFG model to yield uniform speech outputs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively creates natural-looking talking faces and speech that accurately match the input text. To our knowledge, this is the first effort to build a multimodal synthesis system that can generalise to unseen identities.

CrossSpeech: Speaker-independent Acoustic Representation for Cross-lingual Speech Synthesis

While recent text-to-speech (TTS) systems have made remarkable strides toward human-level quality, the performance of cross-lingual TTS lags behind that of intra-lingual TTS. This gap is mainly rooted from the speaker-language entanglement problem in cross-lingual TTS. In this paper, we propose CrossSpeech which improves the quality of cross-lingual speech by effectively disentangling speaker and language information in the level of acoustic feature space. Specifically, CrossSpeech decomposes the speech generation pipeline into the speaker-independent generator (SIG) and speaker-dependent generator (SDG). The SIG produces the speaker-independent acoustic representation which is not biased to specific speaker distributions. On the other hand, the SDG models speaker-dependent speech variation that characterizes speaker attributes. By handling each information separately, CrossSpeech can obtain disentangled speaker and language representations. From the experiments, we verify that CrossSpeech achieves significant improvements in cross-lingual TTS, especially in terms of speaker similarity to the target speaker.