Paper ID: 2306.02982

PolyVoice: Language Models for Speech to Speech Translation

Qianqian Dong, Zhiying Huang, Qiao Tian, Chen Xu, Tom Ko, Yunlong Zhao, Siyuan Feng, Tang Li, Kexin Wang, Xuxin Cheng, Fengpeng Yue, Ye Bai, Xi Chen, Lu Lu, Zejun Ma, Yuping Wang, Mingxuan Wang, Yuxuan Wang

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.

Submitted: Jun 5, 2023