Multilingual Byte2Speech Text-To-Speech Models Are Few-shot Spoken Language Learners

We present a multilingual end-to-end Text-To-Speech framework that maps byte inputs to spectrograms, thus allowing arbitrary input scripts. Besides strong results on 40+ languages, the framework demonstrates capabilities to adapt to various new languages under extreme low-resource and even few-shot scenarios of merely 40s transcribed recording without the need of lexicon, extra corpus, auxiliary models, or particular linguistic expertise, while retains satisfactory intelligibility and naturalness matching rich-resource models. Exhaustive comparative studies are performed to reveal the potential of the framework for low-resource application and the impact of various factors contributory to adaptation. Furthermore, we propose a novel method to extract language-specific sub-networks for a better understanding of the mechanism of multilingual models.