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SqueezeWave: Extremely Lightweight Vocoders for On-device Speech Synthesis

By Bohan Zhai *, Tianren Gao *, Flora Xue, Daniel Rothchild, Bichen Wu, Joseph Gonzalez, and Kurt Keutzer (UC Berkeley)

Automatic speech synthesis is a challenging task that is becoming increasingly important as edge devices begin to interact with users through speech. Typical text-to-speech pipelines include a vocoder, which translates intermediate audio representations into an audio waveform. Most existing vocoders are difficult to parallelize since each generated sample is conditioned on previous samples. WaveGlow is a flow-based feed-forward alternative to these auto-regressive models (Prenger et al., 2019). However, while WaveGlow can be easily parallelized, the model is too expensive for real-time speech synthesis on the edge. This paper presents SqueezeWave, a family of lightweight vocoders based on WaveGlow that can generate audio of similar quality to WaveGlow with 61x - 214x fewer MACs.

Link to the paper: paper. If you find this work useful, please consider citing

@inproceedings{squeezewave,
   Author = {Bohan Zhai, Tianren Gao, Flora Xue, Daniel Rothchild, Bichen Wu, Joseph Gonzalez, Kurt Keutzer},
   Title = {SqueezeWave: Extremely Lightweight Vocoders for On-device Speech Synthesis},
   Journal = {arXiv:2001.05685},
   Year = {2020}
}

Audio samples generated by SqueezeWave

Audio samples of SqueezeWave are here: https://tianrengao.github.io/SqueezeWaveDemo/

Results

We introduce 4 variants of SqueezeWave in our paper. See the table below.

Model Complexity

A detailed MAC calculation can be found from here

Setup

0. (Optional) Create a virtual environment

   virtualenv env
   source env/bin/activate
   

1. Clone our repo and initialize submodule

   git clone https://github.com/tianrengao/SqueezeWave.git
   cd SqueezeWave
   git submodule init
   git submodule update
   

2. Install requirements pip3 install -r requirements.txt

3. Install Apex

   cd ../
   git clone https://www.github.com/nvidia/apex
   cd apex
   python setup.py install
   

Generate audio with our pretrained model

1. Download our pretrained models. We provide 4 pretrained models as described in the paper.

2. Download mel-spectrograms

3. Generate audio. Please replace SqueezeWave.pt to the specific pretrained model's name.

   python3 inference.py -f <(ls mel_spectrograms/*.pt) -w SqueezeWave.pt -o . --is_fp16 -s 0.6

Train your own model

1. Download LJ Speech Data. We assume all the waves are stored in the directory ^/data/

2. Make a list of the file names to use for training/testing

   ls data/*.wav | tail -n+10 > train_files.txt
   ls data/*.wav | head -n10 > test_files.txt
   

3. We provide 4 model configurations with audio channel and channel numbers specified in the table below. The configuration files are under /configs directory. To choose the model you want to train, select the corresponding configuration file.

4. Train your SqueezeWave model

   mkdir checkpoints
   python train.py -c configs/config_a256_c128.json
   

   For multi-GPU training replace train.py with distributed.py. Only tested with single node and NCCL.

   For mixed precision training set "fp16_run": true on config.json.

5. Make test set mel-spectrograms

   mkdir -p eval/mels
   python3 mel2samp.py -f test_files.txt -o eval/mels -c configs/config_a128_c256.json
   

6. Run inference on the test data.

   ls eval/mels > eval/mel_files.txt
   sed -i -e 's_.*_eval/mels/&_' eval/mel_files.txt
   mkdir -p eval/output
   python3 inference.py -f eval/mel_files.txt -w checkpoints/SqueezeWave_10000 -o eval/output --is_fp16 -s 0.6
   

   Replace SqueezeWave_10000 with the checkpoint you want to test.

Credits

The implementation of this work is based on WaveGlow: https://github.com/NVIDIA/waveglow