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Abstract

This work explores the task of synthesizing speech in human-sounding voices unseen in any training set. We call this task "speaker generation", and present TacoSpawn, a system that performs competitively at this task. TacoSpawn is a deep generative text-to-speech model that learns a distribution over a speaker embedding space, which enables sampling of novel and diverse speakers. Our method is easy to implement, and does not require transfer learning from speaker ID systems. We present objective and subjective metrics for evaluating performance on this task, and demonstrate that our proposed objective metrics correlate with human perception of speaker similarity.