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Tacotron

An implementation of Tacotron speech synthesis in Tensorflow.

Audio Samples

  • Audio Samples after training for 877k steps (~11 days).
    • Speech started to become intelligble around 20k steps.
    • There hasn't been much improvement since around 200k steps -- loss has gone down, but it's hard to notice listening to the audio.

Background

Earlier this year, Google published a paper, Tacotron: A Fully End-to-End Text-To-Speech Synthesis Model, where they present a neural text-to-speech model that learns to synthesize speech directly from (text, audio) pairs. However, they didn't release their source code or training data. This is an attempt to provide an open-source implementation of the model described in their paper.

The quality isn't as good as Google's demo yet, but hopefully it will get there someday :-). Pull requests are welcome!

Quick Start

Installing dependencies

Make sure you have Python 3. Then:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Using a pre-trained model

  1. Download and unpack a model:

    curl http://data.keithito.com/data/speech/tacotron-20170720.tar.bz2 | tar x -C /tmp

  2. Run the demo server:

    python3 demo_server.py --checkpoint /tmp/tacotron-20170720/model.ckpt

  3. Point your browser at localhost:9000

    • Type what you want to synthesize

Training

Note: you need at least 40GB of free disk space to train a model.

  1. Download a speech dataset.

    The following are supported out of the box:

    You can use other datasets if you convert them to the right format. See ljspeech.py for an example.

  2. Unpack the dataset into ~/tacotron

    After unpacking, your tree should look like this for LJ Speech:

    tacotron
  |- LJSpeech-1.0
      |- metadata.csv
      |- wavs

    or like this for Blizzard 2012:

    tacotron
  |- Blizzard2012
      |- ATrampAbroad
      |   |- sentence_index.txt
      |   |- lab
      |   |- wav
      |- TheManThatCorruptedHadleyburg
          |- sentence_index.txt
          |- lab
          |- wav

  3. Preprocess the data

    python3 preprocess.py --dataset ljspeech
    • Use --dataset blizzard for Blizzard data

  4. Train a model

    python3 train.py

  5. Monitor with Tensorboard (optional)

    tensorboard --logdir ~/tacotron/logs-tacotron

    The trainer dumps audio and alignments every 1000 steps. You can find these in ~/tacotron/logs-tacotron.

  6. Synthesize from a checkpoint

    python3 demo_server.py --checkpoint ~/tacotron/logs-tacotron/model.ckpt-185000

    Replace "185000" with the checkpoint number that you want to use, then open a browser to localhost:9000 and type what you want to speak. Alternately, you can run eval.py at the command line:

    python3 eval.py --checkpoint ~/tacotron/logs-tacotron/model.ckpt-185000

Miscellaneous Notes

  • TCMalloc seems to improve training speed and avoids occasional slowdowns seen with the default allocator. You can enable it by installing it and setting LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libtcmalloc.so.

  • You can train with CMUDict by downloading the dictionary to ~/tacotron/training and then passing the flag --hparams="use_cmudict=True" to train.py. This will allow you to pass ARPAbet phonemes enclosed in curly braces at eval time to force a particular pronunciation, e.g. Turn left on {HH AW1 S S T AH0 N} Street.

  • If you pass a Slack incoming webhook URL as the --slack_url flag to train.py, it will send you progress updates every 1000 steps.

  • Occasionally, you may see a spike in loss and the model will forget how to attend (the alignments will no longer make sense). Although it will recover eventually, it may save time to restart at a checkpoint prior to the spike by passing the --restore_step=150000 flag to train.py (replacing 150000 with a step number prior to the spike). Update: a recent fix to gradient clipping by @candlewill may have fixed this.

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