StreamVoice: Streamable Context-Aware Language Modeling for Real-time Zero-Shot Voice Conversion

Zhichao Wang, Yuanzhe Chen, Xinsheng Wang, Lei Xie, Yuping Wang


Abstract
Recent language model (LM) advancements have showcased impressive zero-shot voice conversion (VC) performance. However, existing LM-based VC models usually apply offline conversion from source semantics to acoustic features, demanding the complete source speech and limiting their deployment to real-time applications. In this paper, we introduce StreamVoice, a novel streaming LM-based model for zero-shot VC, facilitating real-time conversion given arbitrary speaker prompts and source speech. Specifically, to enable streaming capability, StreamVoice employs a fully causal context-aware LM with a temporal-independent acoustic predictor, while alternately processing semantic and acoustic features at each time step of autoregression which eliminates the dependence on complete source speech. To address the potential performance degradation from the incomplete context in streaming processing, we enhance the context-awareness of the LM through two strategies: 1) teacher-guided context foresight, using a teacher model to summarize the present and future semantic context during training to guide the model’s forecasting for missing context; 2) semantic masking strategy, promoting acoustic prediction from preceding corrupted semantic and acoustic input, enhancing context-learning ability. Notably, StreamVoice is the first LM-based streaming zero-shot VC model without any future look-ahead. Experiments demonstrate StreamVoice’s streaming conversion capability while achieving zero-shot performance comparable to non-streaming VC systems.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.396
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7328–7338
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.396
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.396
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhichao Wang, Yuanzhe Chen, Xinsheng Wang, Lei Xie, and Yuping Wang. 2024. StreamVoice: Streamable Context-Aware Language Modeling for Real-time Zero-Shot Voice Conversion. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7328–7338, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
StreamVoice: Streamable Context-Aware Language Modeling for Real-time Zero-Shot Voice Conversion (Wang et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.396.pdf