Intelli-Z: Toward Intelligible Zero-Shot TTS

Although numerous recent studies have suggested new frameworks for zero-shot TTS using large-scale, real-world data, studies that focus on the intelligibility of zero-shot TTS are relatively scarce. Zero-shot TTS demands additional efforts to ensure clear pronunciation and speech quality due to its inherent requirement of replacing a core parameter (speaker embedding or acoustic prompt) with a new one at the inference stage. In this study, we propose a zero-shot TTS model focused on intelligibility, which we refer to as Intelli-Z. Intelli-Z learns speaker embeddings by using multi-speaker TTS as its teacher and is trained with a cycle-consistency loss to include mismatched text-speech pairs for training. Additionally, it selectively aggregates speaker embeddings along the temporal dimension to minimize the interference of the text content of reference speech at the inference stage. We substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed methods with an ablation study. The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) increases by 9% for unseen speakers when the first two methods are applied, and it further improves by 16% when selective temporal aggregation is applied.