Education

SPCC

The Speech Processing Courses in Crete (SPCC) are targeting to teach graduate students and researchers the latest advancements of speech processing covering theory, hands on, and establishing contacts between the academics and industry. The school will provide the chance to students and professionals to meet world leaders in speech technology, exchanging ideas, sharing experiences and vision. The Summer School is organized by the University of Crete, Greece.

2020

• webpage: http://spcc.csd.uoc.gr/
• For 2020, the school topic is Neural approaches for speech enhancement, synthesis, and coding, the topic includes:
  • Basic components of neural vocoders: Wavenet, Parallel Wavenet, and WaveRNN
  • Deep generative models for speech compression
  • Neural auto-regressive, source-filter and glottal vocoders for speech and music signals
  • Neural vocoders for coding, synthesis, and enhancement

2019

• webpage: http://spcc.csd.uoc.gr/2019/
• For 2019, the school topic is Conversational Speech Synthesis: from design to evaluation, the topic includes:
  • Introduction to modern statistical dialogue systems and requests for a conversational speech synthesis system
  • Modern Acoustic Modelling Approaches (WaveNet, Tacotron)
  • Advanced flexibility for effective conversational TTS: Style token and Voice Conversion
  • Evaluation of conversational and multimodal TTS

2018

• webpage: http://spcc.csd.uoc.gr/SPCC2018/
• For 2018, the school topic is Towards Flexible and Intelligible End-to-End Speech synthesis systems, The topic includes:
  • Modern Acoustic Modelling Approaches (WaveNet, Tacotron)
  • Contemporary Unit Selection: The art of creating thousands of voices in real products
  • Advanced Voice Conversion using Deep Learning (Wavenet, GAN, etc)
  • Intelligibility and Cognitive Effort in Speech Synthesis

2017

• webpage: http://spcc.csd.uoc.gr/SPCC2017/
• the school topic is: Towards Intelligible and Conversational Speech Synthesis Engines, The topic includes:
  • Modern Acoustic Modelling Approaches (DNN/LSTM, WaveNet)
  • Text Normalization and Linguistic Analysis
  • Prosody
  • Advanced Vocoders and Modifications (Voice Conversion)
  • Intelligibility and Cognitive Effort in Speech Synthesis

2016

• webpage: http://spcc.csd.uoc.gr/SPCC2016/
• the school topic is: Advancements in Modern Speech Synthesis Engines, The topic includes:
  • Advanced Speech Signal Modelling and Modifications
  • Current Acoustic Modelling Approaches
  • Challenges in Fornt-End Processing
  • Listening Context Aware Speech Synthesis Systems
  • Text Normalization and Linguistic Analysis

Lecture slides used for SPCC 2016 are available online

• Dr. Yannis Agiomyrgiannakis, Google UK : Vocaine the Vocoder
• Prof. Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete : Adaptive Sinusoidal Models
• Prof. Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete : Sinusoidal Modeling
• Prof. Simon King, University of Edinburgh : Text Processing for Speech Synthesis
• Dr. Spyros Raptis, ILSP Athena : Unit-Selection-based Text-To-Speech Synthesis
• Prof. Simon King, University of Edinburgh : Speech Synthesis with Hidden Markov Models
• Dr. Vassilis Tsiaras, University of Crete : Linear Dynamical Models in Speech Synthesis
• Dr. Yannis Agiomyrgiannakis, Google UK : Vocoder-side Voice Morphing for TTS
• Dr. Heiga Zen, Google UK : Artificial Neural Network based Speech Synthesis
• Dr. Masami Akamine, Toshiba Japan : Closed Loop Diphone-based Text-To-Speech Synthesis
• Prof. Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete : Speech Intelligibility
• Prof. Simon King, University of Edinburgh : Evaluating Speech Synthesis
• Prof. Simon King, University of Edinburgh : Hybrid Speech Synthesis

2015

• webpage: http://spcc.csd.uoc.gr/SPCC2015/
• the school topic is: From Diphones to Modern Speech Synthesis Engines, The topic includes:
  • Speech Signal Modelling and Modifications
  • Acoustic Modelling: HMM, LDM, DNN
  • Approaches: Diphones, Unit Selection, Statistical, Hybrid
  • Listening Context Aware speech synthesis systems

2014

• webpage: http://spcc.csd.uoc.gr/SPCC2014/

Lecture slides used for SPCC 2014 are available online

• Prof. Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete, Greece : Welcome and Introduction
• Prof. Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete, Greece : Speech Production and Modeling
• Prof. Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete, Greece : Voice Pathology
• Prof. Rainer Martin, Intitute of Communication Acoustics, Germany : Signal Processing for Hearing Aids
• Prof. Gerasimos Potamianos, University of Thessaly, Greece : Automatic Speech Recognition
• Dr Milica Gasic, University of Cambridge, U.K. : Spoken Dialogue Systems I
• Dr Milica Gasic, University of Cambridge, U.K. : Spoken Dialogue Systems II
• Dr Olivier Pietquin, Univeristy of Lille 1, France : Statistical Dialogue Modeling
• Dr Nassos Katsamanis, NTUA, Athens : Distant Speech Recognition

Keynotes & tutorials at International conferences and workshops

• Simon King, Speech synthesis: where did the signal processing go? @ EUSIPCO2017
• Simon King, Oliver Watts, Srikanth Ronanki, Zhizheng Wu, Felipe Espic, Deep Learning for Text-to-Speech Synthesis, using the Merlin toolkit @ Interspeech 2017
• John Makhoul: A 50-year retrospective on speech and languag processing @ Interspeech 2016
• Haizhou Li, Voice conversion and spoofing countermeasures for speaker verification @ Odyssey 2016
• Shri Narayanan, Understanding individual-level speech variability: From novel speech production data to robust speaker recognition @ Odyssey 2016
• Yao Qian and Frank K. Soong, Deep Learning for Speech Generation and Synthesis @ ISCSLP 2014
• Martin Cooke, Speaking in adverse conditions: from behavioural observations to intelligibility-enhancing speech modifications @ Odyssey 2014
• Keiichi Tokuda, Speech Synthesis as A Statistical Machine Learning Problem @ ASRU 2011
• Keiichi Tokuda, Heiga Zen, Fundamentals and recent advances in HMM-based speech synthesis @ Interspeech 2009

Podcasts

Simon King, Using speech synthesis to give everyone their own voice, Inaugural lecture, University of Edinburgh https://itunes.apple.com/jp/podcast/prof-simon-king-using-speech-synthesis-to-give-everyone/id738501766?i=1000170300147&mt=2

Keiichi Tokuda, Human-like singing and talking machine, Human Language Technology Lecture Series, MIT https://itunes.apple.com/jp/podcast/human-like-singing-and-talking-machines/id787393959?i=1000344067611&mt=2

Youtube videos

SynSIG

SynSIG has a dedicated channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiNEMZxIjvlsBKlBdAqT-VQ

Others

• Kim Silverman - Speech Synthesis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mjh0PSUv0M
• Prof. Simon King - Using Speech Synthesis to give Everyone their own Voice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzL-pxcpo-E
• Zhen-Hua Ling - HMM-based Speech Synthesis: Fundamentals and Its Recent Advances https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPdOp72bOCA

Other kind of teaching materials

• Simon King's course website

• An introductory course on speech processing (in French and English) by Thierry Dutoit, , Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium.

• TTSBOX, A Matlab tutorial toolbox on corpus-based Text-to-Speech synthesis, by Thierry Dutoit, Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium.

Historical images

Take a look at our gallery of historical images.

External Links

• See our external references page
• Dennis Klatt's History of Speech Synthesis,
• Examples of Synthesized Speech,
• "The Talking Computer": Text to Speech Synthesis (J.P. Olive in Hal's Legacy, MITPress),
• German-TTS and emotional synthesis ([1] and [2]) demo by Felix Burkhardt.