Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product.

Voice Builder

Voice Builder is an opensource text-to-speech (TTS) voice building tool that focuses on simplicity, flexibility, and collaboration. Our tool allows anyone with basic computer skills to run voice training experiments and listen to the resulting synthesized voice.

We hope that this tool will reduce the barrier for creating new voices and accelerate TTS research, by making experimentation faster and interdisciplinary collaboration easier. We believe that our tool can help improve TTS research, especially for low-resourced languages, where more experimentations are often needed to get the most out of the limited data.

Publication - https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub46977

• Installation
  • Prerequisites
  • Deployment
  • Create an example voice
  • (Optional) Using Custom Data Exporter
  • Voice Builder specification
• Additional Information

Installation

Prerequisites

1. Create a project on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

   If you don't have an account yet, please create one for yourself.

2. Enable billing and request more quota for your project

3. Install Docker

4. Go to firebase.com and import the project to firebase platform

   If you don't have an account yet, please create one for yourself.

5. Install gcloud cmd line tool by installing Cloud SDK

6. Install Node.js

7. Install firebase cmd line tool

8. Enable all the following GCP services:

   • Appengine API
   • Firebase Cloud Function
   • Genomics Pipeline API

   Use this url to enable them all at once.

   Usually, it would take a few minutes to enable APIs and GCP will bring you to another page to set credentials for these. Please just skip and close the page as we don't need any new credential setting.

9. [Optional] Setup your own custom data exporter

Deployment

If you have not completed all prerequisites, please do so before going further in the following steps.

1. Clone this project to your current directory by:

   git clone https://github.com/google/voice-builder.git && cd voice-builder
   

2. If you haven't logged in to your account via gcloud yet, please log in by:

   gcloud auth login
   

3. Also, if you haven't logged in to your account via firebase, please log in by:

   firebase login --no-localhost
   

4. Open deploy.sh and edit the following variables:

   • PROJECT_NAME: your created GCP project's name from Prerequisite 1) e.g. vb-test-project
   • PROJECT_ID: your created GCP project's id from Prerequisite 1) e.g. vb-test-project
   • GCP_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_EMAIL: Use Compute Engine service account (you can find one by clicking on top left menu under "IAM & admin > Service accounts") e.g. [email protected]

5. Create GCS buckets for Voice Builder to store each job data

   ./deploy.sh initial_setup
   

6. Deploy cloud functions component

   ./deploy.sh cloud_functions
   

7. Deploy ui component

   ./deploy.sh ui create
   

   After the deployment, you should get an IP that you can access from command line's result (EXTERNAL_IP). You can access your instance of Voice Builder by visiting http://EXTERNAL_IP:3389 in your browser.

Create an example voice

At this step, you should have all components in place and can access the UI at http://EXTERNAL_IP:3389. VoiceBuilder initially provides you with two example TTS engines (Festival and Merlin) and public data from language resources repo.

You can test if everything is now working correctly by creating a new voice yourself using our provided Festival engine by:

1. Access http://EXTERNAL_IP:3389 and go to a create-voice form by clicking "CREATE VOICE" tab on top.
2. You will see a form where you can choose different TTS engines and input data for your voice. Just skim through as we will use this initial config for building a new voice. Try clicking "Create Voice" button at the bottom. After a short moment, you should get a notification on the top right saying "successfully created a job".
3. Click on "JOBS" tab. Now, you should see a new job that you have just created. It usually takes 30mins to 1 hour to run. You can check the status of the job by clicking on the job id to see the job status page.
4. After an hour, you should see "Completed Voice Model Deployment" under the job status. This means the successfully built model has been deployed to a voice synthesis server. Try putting in "hello" in the text input box at the bottom of the job status page and click "Synthesize" button. Voice Builder should generate a spectrogram and have a play button for you to listen to the voice!

(Optional) Using Custom Data Exporter

Data Exporter is another additional component you can add to the system. Normally, Voice Builder can work without Data Exporter. Without it, Voice Builder would just use the input files as they are.

However, in some cases you want to apply some conversion to your input files before feeding them into TTS algorithms. For example:

• You have lexicon file that is in a different format from the one accepted by your chosen TTS algorithm.
• You want to filter out some bad data before using it in your chosen TTS algorithm.

Voice Builder gives you the flexibility to add your own data exporter which you can use to manipulate data before running the actual TTS algorithm. Your custom data exporter will get a Voice Specification containing file location, chosen TTS algorithm, tuning parameters, etc. You can use these information to manipulate/convert your data. In the end, your data exporter should put all necessary files into the designated job folder to trigger the actual TTS algorithm to run.

Firstly, you need to give your data exporter access to GCS buckets.

1. Open /deploy.sh and edit the following variables:

   • DATA_EXPORTER_SERVICE_ACCOUNT: getting it by creating a new service account for your data exporter to access GCS buckets.

2. Run command to give DATA_EXPORTER_SERVICE_ACCOUNT an ACL access to GCS buckets

   ./deploy.sh acl_for_data_exporter
   

   Secondly, you need to set your data exporter's url in config.js so that Voice Builder knows where to send Voice Specification information to.

3. Open /config.js and add DATA_EXPORTER_API to the config as follows:

   DATA_EXPORTER_API: {
     BASE_URL: '<DATA_EXPORTER_URL>',
     API_KEY: '<DATA_EXPORTER_API_KEY>',
   }
   

   where BASE_URL is your data exporter url and API_KEY is the api key of your data exporter.

4. Redeploy Voice Builder UI instance so that it now has a new config and knows where to send Voice Specification info. to your data exporter

   ./deploy.sh ui update
   

5. Try to create a new job! Voice Builder should now send a request to your DATA_EXPORTER_URL with the created job's Voice Specification.

Voice Builder specification

VoiceBuildingSpecification is a JSON definition of the voice specification. This specification is created by the Voice Builder backend when a user triggers a voice building request from the UI. It can be used by the data exporter (passed to the data exporter via its API) to convert files and by the TTS engine for its training parameters.

{
  "id": int,
  "voice_name": string,
  "created_by": string,
  "job_folder": string,
  "lexicon_path": object(Path),
  "phonology_path": object(Path),
  "wavs_path": object(Path),
  "wavs_info_path": object(Path),
  "sample_rate": int,
  "tts_engine": string,
  "engine_params": [object(EngineParam)],
}

EngineParam

EngineParam contains a parameter for TTS Backend engine.

{
  "key": string,
  "value": string
}

Path

Path contains information about the file path.

{
  "path": string
  "file_type": string
}

Example

For example, if you set up your data exporter, when you create a voice using our predefined Festival engine, Voice Builder will send the request body similar to below to your data exporter. Your data exporter then have to pre-process data and put them in job_folder location (which is gs://your-voice-builder-jobs/1 in this example). After all necessary files are placed in the folder, the actual voice building process will begin automatically as expected.

{
  "id": 1,
  "voice_name": "my_voice",
  "createdBy": "[email protected]",
  “job_folder”: "gs://your-voice-builder-jobs/1";
  "engine_params": [
    {
      "key": "param_for_festival1",
      "value": "50"
    },
    {
      "key": "param_for_festival2",
      "value": "30"
    }
  ],
  "sample_rate": "22050",
  "tts_engine": "festival",
  "lexicon_path": {
    "path": "gs://voice-builder-public-data/examples/sinhala/lexicon.scm",
    "file_type": "SCM"
  },
  "phonology_path": {
    "path": "gs://voice-builder-public-data/examples/sinhala/phonology.json",
    "file_type": "JSON_EXTERNAL_PHONOLOGY"
  },
  "wavs_path": {
    "path": "gs://voice-builder-public-data/examples/sinhala/wavs.tar.gz",
    "file_type": "TAR"
  },
  "wavs_info_path": {
    "path": "gs://voice-builder-public-data/examples/sinhala/txt.done.data",
    "file_type": "LINE_INDEX"
  },
}

Additional Information

• JSON Phonology