PolyVoice: Language Models for Speech to Speech Translation
Authors: name: Qianqian Dong; name: Zhiying Huang; name: Chen Xu; name: Yunlong Zhao; name: Kexin Wang; name: Xuxin Cheng; name: Tom Ko; name: Qiao Tian; name: Tang Li; name: Fengpeng Yue; name: Ye Bai; name: Xi Chen; name: Lu Lu; name: Zejun Ma; name: Yuping Wang; name: Mingxuan Wang; name: Yuxuan Wang
Published: 2023-06-05 15:53:15

Abstract: We propose PolyVoice, a language model-based framework for speech-to-speech
translation (S2ST) system. Our framework consists of two language models: a
translation language model and a speech synthesis language model. We use
discretized speech units, which are generated in a fully unsupervised way, and
thus our framework can be used for unwritten languages. For the speech
synthesis part, we adopt the existing VALL-E X approach and build a unit-based
audio language model. This grants our framework the ability to preserve the
voice characteristics and the speaking style of the original speech. We examine
our system on Chinese rightarrow English and English rightarrow Spanish
pairs. Experimental results show that our system can generate speech with high
translation quality and audio quality. Speech samples are available at
https://speechtranslation.github.io/polyvoice.