# Generating Multilingual Gender-Ambiguous Text-to-Speech Voices

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00375 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00375/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10135/) (2017)
- [Generalized End-to-End Loss for Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10467/) (2017)
- [Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-To-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04558/) (2018)
- [LPCNet: Improving Neural Speech Synthesis Through Linear Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11846/) (2018)
- [Non-Attentive Tacotron: Robust and Controllable Neural TTS Synthesis Including Unsupervised Duration Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04301/) (2020)
- [High Quality Streaming Speech Synthesis with Low, Sentence-Length-Independent Latency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09052/) (2021)
- [SOMOS: The Samsung Open MOS Dataset for the Evaluation of Neural Text-to-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03040/) (2022)
- [Speaker Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05095/) (2021)
- [Generating gender-ambiguous voices for privacy-preserving speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01052/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The gender of any voice user interface is a key element of its perceived identity. Recently, there has been increasing interest in interfaces where the gender is ambiguous rather than clearly identifying as female or male. This work addresses the task of generating novel gender-ambiguous TTS voices in a multi-speaker, multilingual setting. This is accomplished by efficiently sampling from a latent speaker embedding space using a proposed gender-aware method. Extensive objective and subjective evaluations clearly indicate that this method is able to efficiently generate a range of novel, diverse voices that are consistent and perceived as more gender-ambiguous than a baseline voice across all the languages examined. Interestingly, the gender perception is found to be robust across two demographic factors of the listeners: native language and gender. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic and validated approach that can reliably generate a variety of gender-ambiguous voices.