  This work adapts two recent architectures of generative models and evaluates
their effectiveness for the conversion of whispered speech to normal speech. We
incorporate the normal target speech into the training criterion of
vector-quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) and MelGANs, thereby
conditioning the systems to recover voiced speech from whispered inputs.
Objective and subjective quality measures indicate that both VQ-VAEs and
MelGANs can be modified to perform the conversion task. We find that the
proposed approaches significantly improve the Mel cepstral distortion (MCD)
metric by at least 25% relative to a DiscoGAN baseline. Subjective listening
tests suggest that the MelGAN-based system significantly improves naturalness,
intelligibility, and voicing compared to the whispered input speech. A novel
evaluation measure based on differences between latent speech representations
also indicates that our MelGAN-based approach yields improvements relative to
the baseline.

Sound;Audio and Speech Processing