Text to Speech

TTS, Text-To-Speech or Speech Synthesis refers to the problem of getting a program to generate human voice output output from text. TAO Toolkit supports a two-stage pipeline for TTS:

1. A spectrogram model to generate a Mel spectrogram from text (FastPitch)
2. A vocoder model to generate audio from a Mel spectrogram (HiFiGAN)

Our goal here is to generate FastPitch and HiFiGAN model, that when cascaded generates a good quality human voice from text.

The best place to get started with TAO Toolkit - TTS would be the TAO - TTS jupyter notebooks sample enclosed in this sample.
This resource has three notebooks included.

1. Training: Sample workflow for training FastPitch spectrogram generator model and a HiFiGAN vocoder model and export them to a .riva file
2. Finetuning: Sample workflow to finetune a FastPitch spectrogram generator model and a HiFiGAN vocoder model from another pretrained FastPitch and HiFiGAN model.
3. Deployment: Sample workflow to consume the .riva files and deploy it to Riva.

If you are a seasoned Conversation AI developer we recommend installing TAO and referring to the TAO documentation for detailed information.

Pre-Requisites

Please make sure to install the following before proceeding further:

• python 3.6.9
• python-dev
• docker-ce > 19.03.5
• docker-API 1.40
• nvidia-container-toolkit > 1.3.0-1
• nvidia-container-runtime > 3.4.0-1
• nvidia-docker2 > 2.5.0-1
• nvidia-driver >= 455.23

Note: A compatible NVIDIA GPU would be required.

Installation

We recommend that you install TAO Toolkit inside a virtual environment. The steps to do the same are as follows

virtualenv -p python3 <name of venv>
source <name of venv>/bin/activate
pip install jupyter notebook # If you need to run the notebooks

TAO Toolkit is a python package that is hosted in nvidia python package index. You may install by using python’s package manager, pip.

pip install nvidia-pyindex
pip install nvidia-tao

To download the jupyter notebook please:

1. Download the samples using the ngc cli with the following command

       ngc registry resource download-version "nvidia/tao/texttospeech_notebook:v1.1"

2. Instantiate the jupyter notebook server

       jupyter notebook --ip 0.0.0.0 --allow-root --port 8888

License

By downloading and using the models and resources packaged with TAO Toolkit Conversational AI, you would be accepting the terms of the Riva license