IndicVoices-R: Unlocking a Massive Multilingual Multi-speaker Speech Corpus for Scaling Indian TTS
<|reference_start|>IndicVoices-R: Unlocking a Massive Multilingual Multi-speaker Speech Corpus for Scaling Indian TTS: Recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis show that large-scale models trained with extensive web data produce highly natural-sounding output. However, such data is scarce for Indian languages due to the lack of high-quality, manually subtitled data on platforms like LibriVox or YouTube. To address this gap, we enhance existing large-scale ASR datasets containing natural conversations collected in low-quality environments to generate high-quality TTS training data. Our pipeline leverages the cross-lingual generalization of denoising and speech enhancement models trained on English and applied to Indian languages. This results in IndicVoices-R (IV-R), the largest multilingual Indian TTS dataset derived from an ASR dataset, with 1,704 hours of high-quality speech from 10,496 speakers across 22 Indian languages. IV-R matches the quality of gold-standard TTS datasets like LJSpeech, LibriTTS, and IndicTTS. We also introduce the IV-R Benchmark, the first to assess zero-shot, few-shot, and many-shot speaker generalization capabilities of TTS models on Indian voices, ensuring diversity in age, gender, and style. We demonstrate that fine-tuning an English pre-trained model on a combined dataset of high-quality IndicTTS and our IV-R dataset results in better zero-shot speaker generalization compared to fine-tuning on the IndicTTS dataset alone. Further, our evaluation reveals limited zero-shot generalization for Indian voices in TTS models trained on prior datasets, which we improve by fine-tuning the model on our data containing diverse set of speakers across language families. We open-source all data and code, releasing the first TTS model for all 22 official Indian languages.<|reference_end|>
@article{sankar2024indicvoices-r:,
    title={IndicVoices-R: Unlocking a Massive Multilingual Multi-speaker Speech
  Corpus for Scaling Indian TTS},
    author={Ashwin Sankar and Srija Anand and Praveen Srinivasa Varadhan and
  Sherry Thomas and Mehak Singal and Shridhar Kumar and Deovrat Mehendale and
  Aditi Krishana and Giri Raju and Mitesh Khapra},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.05356},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2409.05356},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.LG cs.SD eess.SP}
}