The IMS Toucan System for the Blizzard Challenge 2023
Florian Lux Julia Koch Sarina Meyer Thomas Bott Nadja Schauffler Pavel Denisov Antje Schweitzer Ngoc Thang Vu
For our contribution to the Blizzard Challenge 2023, we improved on the
system we submitted to the Blizzard Challenge 2021. Our approach entails a
rule-based text-to-phoneme processing system that includes rule-based
disambiguation of homographs in the French language. It then transforms the
phonemes to spectrograms as intermediate representations using a fast and
efficient non-autoregressive synthesis architecture based on Conformer and
Glow. A GAN based neural vocoder that combines recent state-of-the-art
approaches converts the spectrogram to the final wave. We carefully designed
the data processing, training, and inference procedures for the challenge data.
Our system identifier is G. Open source code and demo are available.