# The IMS Toucan System for the Blizzard Challenge 2023

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17499 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17499/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06103/) (2021)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [CamemBERT: a Tasty French Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03894/) (2019)
- [MelGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Conditional Waveform Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06711/) (2019)
- [Glow-TTS: A Generative Flow for Text-to-Speech via Monotonic Alignment Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11129/) (2020)
- [Style Tokens: Unsupervised Style Modeling, Control and Transfer in End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09017/) (2018)
- [BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04658/) (2022)
- [NaturalSpeech 2: Latent Diffusion Models are Natural and Zero-Shot Speech and Singing Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09116/) (2023)
- [FastPitch: Parallel Text-to-speech with Pitch Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06873/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Adversarial Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03575/) (2020)
- [PortaSpeech: Portable and High-Quality Generative Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15166/) (2021)
- [AdaSpeech 4: Adaptive Text to Speech in Zero-Shot Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00436/) (2022)
- [VoiceFixer: A Unified Framework for High-Fidelity Speech Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05841/) (2022)
- [A Vector Quantized Approach for Text to Speech Synthesis on Real-World Spontaneous Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04215/) (2023)
- [Miipher: A Robust Speech Restoration Model Integrating Self-Supervised Speech and Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01664/) (2023)
- [Language-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Low-Resource Text-to-Speech with Articulatory Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03191/) (2022)
- [DelightfulTTS: The Microsoft Speech Synthesis System for Blizzard Challenge 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12612/) (2021)
- [Avocodo: Generative Adversarial Network for Artifact-free Vocoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13404/) (2022)
- [Low-Resource Multilingual and Zero-Shot Multispeaker TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12223/) (2022)
- [Exact Prosody Cloning in Zero-Shot Multispeaker Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12229/) (2022)
- [PoeticTTS -- Controllable Poetry Reading for Literary Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05549/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Meta Learning Text-to-Speech Synthesis in over 7000 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06403/) (2024)
- [Controlling Emotion in Text-to-Speech with Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06406/) (2024)
- [NTU-NPU System for Voice Privacy 2024 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02371/) (2024)
- [Probing the Feasibility of Multilingual Speaker Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02937/) (2024)
- [Investigating Stochastic Methods for Prosody Modeling in Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00227/) (2025)
- [Perceptual implications of automatic anonymization in pathological speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00409/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.