# Convert and Speak: Zero-shot Accent Conversion with Minimum Supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10096/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Speech Resynthesis from Discrete Disentangled Self-Supervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00355/) (2021)
- [NISQA: A Deep CNN-Self-Attention Model for Multidimensional Speech Quality Prediction with Crowdsourced Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09494/) (2021)
- [VQMIVC: Vector Quantization and Mutual Information-Based Unsupervised Speech Representation Disentanglement for One-shot Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10132/) (2021)
- [FragmentVC: Any-to-Any Voice Conversion by End-to-End Extracting and Fusing Fine-Grained Voice Fragments With Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14150/) (2020)
- [TranSpeech: Speech-to-Speech Translation With Bilateral Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12523/) (2022)
- [CommonAccent: Exploring Large Acoustic Pretrained Models for Accent Classification Based on Common Voice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18283/) (2023)
- [TTS-Guided Training for Accent Conversion Without Parallel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10204/) (2022)
- [Latent-Domain Predictive Neural Speech Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08363/) (2022)
- [Improving Accent Conversion with Reference Encoder and End-To-End Text-To-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09271/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [MaskGCT: Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Masked Generative Codec Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00750/) (2024)
- [Vevo2: A Unified and Controllable Framework for Speech and Singing Voice Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16332/) (2025)
- [Pairwise Evaluation of Accent Similarity in Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14410/) (2025)
- [Unifying Speech Recognition, Synthesis and Conversion with Autoregressive Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10770/) (2026)
- [CosyAccent: Duration-Controllable Accent Normalization Using Source-Synthesis Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19166/) (2026)
- [Streaming Non-Autoregressive Model for Accent Conversion and Pronunciation Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16580/) (2025)
- [PHONOS: PHOnetic Neutralization for Online Streaming Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27001/) (2026)
- [StyleStream: Real-Time Zero-Shot Voice Style Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20113/) (2026)
- [Controllable Accent Normalization via Discrete Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14275/) (2026)
- [TokAN: Accent Normalization Using Self-Supervised Speech Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03928/) (2026)
- [Re-Sonance: A Dysarthric Asynchronous Real-Time Speech Conversion System Based on a Three-Stage Cascaded ASR-LLM-TTS Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17615/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Low resource of parallel data is the key challenge of accent conversion(AC) problem in which both the pronunciation units and prosody pattern need to be converted. We propose a two-stage generative framework "convert-and-speak" in which the conversion is only operated on the semantic token level and the speech is synthesized conditioned on the converted semantic token with a speech generative model in target accent domain. The decoupling design enables the "speaking" module to use massive amount of target accent speech and relieves the parallel data required for the "conversion" module. Conversion with the bridge of semantic token also relieves the requirement for the data with text transcriptions and unlocks the usage of language pre-training technology to further efficiently reduce the need of parallel accent speech data. To reduce the complexity and latency of "speaking", a single-stage AR generative model is designed to achieve good quality as well as lower computation cost. Experiments on Indian-English to general American-English conversion show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in accent similarity, speech quality, and speaker maintenance with only 15 minutes of weakly parallel data which is not constrained to the same speaker. Extensive experimentation with diverse accent types suggests that this framework possesses a high degree of adaptability, making it readily scalable to accommodate other accents with low-resource data. Audio samples are available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/convert-and-speak-zero-shot-accent-conversion-with-minimumsupervision/.