Unified speech and gesture synthesis using flow matching

As text-to-speech technologies achieve remarkable naturalness in read-aloud tasks, there is growing interest in multimodal synthesis of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviour, such as spontaneous speech and associated body gestures. This paper presents a novel, unified architecture for jointly synthesising speech acoustics and skeleton-based 3D gesture motion from text, trained using optimal-transport conditional flow matching (OT-CFM). The proposed architecture is simpler than the previous state of the art, has a smaller memory footprint, and can capture the joint distribution of speech and gestures, generating both modalities together in one single process. The new training regime, meanwhile, enables better synthesis quality in much fewer steps (network evaluations) than before. Uni- and multimodal subjective tests demonstrate improved speech naturalness, gesture human-likeness, and cross-modal appropriateness compared to existing benchmarks.

Diffusion-Based Co-Speech Gesture Generation Using Joint Text and Audio Representation

This paper describes a system developed for the GENEA (Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents) Challenge 2023. Our solution builds on an existing diffusion-based motion synthesis model. We propose a contrastive speech and motion pretraining (CSMP) module, which learns a joint embedding for speech and gesture with the aim to learn a semantic coupling between these modalities. The output of the CSMP module is used as a conditioning signal in the diffusion-based gesture synthesis model in order to achieve semantically-aware co-speech gesture generation. Our entry achieved highest human-likeness and highest speech appropriateness rating among the submitted entries. This indicates that our system is a promising approach to achieve human-like co-speech gestures in agents that carry semantic meaning.

Matcha-TTS: A fast TTS architecture with conditional flow matching

We introduce Matcha-TTS, a new encoder-decoder architecture for speedy TTS acoustic modelling, trained using optimal-transport conditional flow matching (OT-CFM). This yields an ODE-based decoder capable of high output quality in fewer synthesis steps than models trained using score matching. Careful design choices additionally ensure each synthesis step is fast to run. The method is probabilistic, non-autoregressive, and learns to speak from scratch without external alignments. Compared to strong pre-trained baseline models, the Matcha-TTS system has the smallest memory footprint, rivals the speed of the fastest models on long utterances, and attains the highest mean opinion score in a listening test. Please see https://shivammehta25.github.io/Matcha-TTS/ for audio examples, code, and pre-trained models.

Diff-TTSG: Denoising probabilistic integrated speech and gesture synthesis

With read-aloud speech synthesis achieving high naturalness scores, there is a growing research interest in synthesising spontaneous speech. However, human spontaneous face-to-face conversation has both spoken and non-verbal aspects (here, co-speech gestures). Only recently has research begun to explore the benefits of jointly synthesising these two modalities in a single system. The previous state of the art used non-probabilistic methods, which fail to capture the variability of human speech and motion, and risk producing oversmoothing artefacts and sub-optimal synthesis quality. We present the first diffusion-based probabilistic model, called Diff-TTSG, that jointly learns to synthesise speech and gestures together. Our method can be trained on small datasets from scratch. Furthermore, we describe a set of careful uni- and multi-modal subjective tests for evaluating integrated speech and gesture synthesis systems, and use them to validate our proposed approach. For synthesised examples please see https://shivammehta25.github.io/Diff-TTSG

Listen, denoise, action! Audio-driven motion synthesis with diffusion models

Diffusion models have experienced a surge of interest as highly expressive yet efficiently trainable probabilistic models. We show that these models are an excellent fit for synthesising human motion that co-occurs with audio, for example co-speech gesticulation, since motion is complex and highly ambiguous given audio, calling for a probabilistic description. Specifically, we adapt the DiffWave architecture to model 3D pose sequences, putting Conformers in place of dilated convolutions for improved accuracy. We also demonstrate control over motion style, using classifier-free guidance to adjust the strength of the stylistic expression. Gesture-generation experiments on the Trinity Speech-Gesture and ZeroEGGS datasets confirm that the proposed method achieves top-of-the-line motion quality, with distinctive styles whose expression can be made more or less pronounced. We also synthesise dance motion and path-driven locomotion using the same model architecture. Finally, we extend the guidance procedure to perform style interpolation in a manner that is appealing for synthesis tasks and has connections to product-of-experts models, a contribution we believe is of independent interest. Video examples are available at https://www.speech.kth.se/research/listen-denoise-action/

OverFlow: Putting flows on top of neural transducers for better TTS

Neural HMMs are a type of neural transducer recently proposed for sequence-to-sequence modelling in text-to-speech. They combine the best features of classic statistical speech synthesis and modern neural TTS, requiring less data and fewer training updates, and are less prone to gibberish output caused by neural attention failures. In this paper, we combine neural HMM TTS with normalising flows for describing the highly non-Gaussian distribution of speech acoustics. The result is a powerful, fully probabilistic model of durations and acoustics that can be trained using exact maximum likelihood. Compared to dominant flow-based acoustic models, our approach integrates autoregression for improved modelling of long-range dependences such as utterance-level prosody. Experiments show that a system based on our proposal gives more accurate pronunciations and better subjective speech quality than comparable methods, whilst retaining the original advantages of neural HMMs. Audio examples and code are available at https://shivammehta25.github.io/OverFlow/

Neural HMMs are all you need (for high-quality attention-free TTS)

Neural sequence-to-sequence TTS has demonstrated significantly better output quality over classical statistical parametric speech synthesis using HMMs. However, the new paradigm is not probabilistic and the use of non-monotonic attention both increases training time and introduces "babbling" failure modes that are unacceptable in production. In this paper, we demonstrate that the old and new paradigms can be combined to obtain the advantages of both worlds, by replacing the attention in Tacotron 2 with an autoregressive left-right no-skip hidden Markov model defined by a neural network. This leads to an HMM-based neural TTS model with monotonic alignment, trained to maximise the full sequence likelihood without approximations. We discuss how to combine innovations from both classical and contemporary TTS for best results. The final system is smaller and simpler than Tacotron 2 and learns to align and speak with fewer iterations, whilst achieving the same naturalness prior to the post-net. Our system also allows easy control over speaking rate. Audio examples and code are available at https://shivammehta007.github.io/Neural-HMM/

Mechanical Chameleons: Evaluating the effects of a social robot's non-verbal behavior on social influence

In this paper we present a pilot study which investigates how non-verbal behavior affects social influence in social robots. We also present a modular system which is capable of controlling the non-verbal behavior based on the interlocutor's facial gestures (head movements and facial expressions) in real time, and a study investigating whether three different strategies for facial gestures ("still", "natural movement", i.e. movements recorded from another conversation, and "copy", i.e. mimicking the user with a four second delay) has any affect on social influence and decision making in a "survival task". Our preliminary results show there was no significant difference between the three conditions, but this might be due to among other things a low number of study participants (12).

Integrated Speech and Gesture Synthesis

Text-to-speech and co-speech gesture synthesis have until now been treated as separate areas by two different research communities, and applications merely stack the two technologies using a simple system-level pipeline. This can lead to modeling inefficiencies and may introduce inconsistencies that limit the achievable naturalness. We propose to instead synthesize the two modalities in a single model, a new problem we call integrated speech and gesture synthesis (ISG). We also propose a set of models modified from state-of-the-art neural speech-synthesis engines to achieve this goal. We evaluate the models in three carefully-designed user studies, two of which evaluate the synthesized speech and gesture in isolation, plus a combined study that evaluates the models like they will be used in real-world applications -- speech and gesture presented together. The results show that participants rate one of the proposed integrated synthesis models as being as good as the state-of-the-art pipeline system we compare against, in all three tests. The model is able to achieve this with faster synthesis time and greatly reduced parameter count compared to the pipeline system, illustrating some of the potential benefits of treating speech and gesture synthesis together as a single, unified problem. Videos and code are available on our project page at https://swatsw.github.io/isg_icmi21/