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Modeling low-resource accents without accent-specific TTS front end

October 27, 2022
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On this page we present additional results and samples from our experiments. The samples below are split in two categories: (1) samples modeling the American, Australian, British (the original), and Irish English accents; (2) samples of the Irish English modeled with two different front ends (British and U.S.) from the main paper.

Generating accented speech

"you have thirteen minutes left on your twenty minute timer."
British English
Irish English
Australian English
U.S. English
"Mount Sheridan has an elevation of over three thousand metres."
British English
Irish English
Australian English
U.S. English
"the title was laugh, camera, action."
British English
Irish English
Australian English
U.S. English
"jefferson knew where he was, and five days after his election he wrote to a baltimore resident and innkeeper, william evans."
British English
Irish English
Australian English
U.S. English
"quotidian means ordinary or very common."
British English
Irish English
Australian English
U.S. English
"the workmen were afraid to touch the bones with their hands, for they feared that the bones were infected with smallpox."
British English
Irish English
Australian English
U.S. English
"The party last night was great craic!"
British English
Irish English
Australian English
U.S. English
"We got ice cream on the way home and we were happy out."
British English
Irish English
Australian English
U.S. English

Ablation studies with different frontends

Below we show samples from a modeled Irish English accent (en-IE, rhotic) using two front ends — British (en-GB, non-rhotic) and American (en-US, rhotic). In the main paper, subjective preference shows significant preference for the model using the en-US front end.

"you have thirteen minutes left on your twenty minute timer."
British English
U.S. English
"Mount Sheridan has an elevation of over three thousand metres."
British English
U.S. English
"the title was laugh, camera, action."
British English
U.S. English
"jefferson knew where he was, and five days after his election he wrote to a baltimore resident and innkeeper, william evans."
British English
U.S. English
"quotidian means ordinary or very common."
British English
U.S. English
"the workmen were afraid to touch the bones with their hands, for they feared that the bones were infected with smallpox."
British English
U.S. English
"The party last night was great craic!"
British English
U.S. English
"We got ice cream on the way home and we were happy out."
British English
U.S. English

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