EmoKnob: Enhance Voice Cloning with Fine-Grained Emotion Control

Haozhe Chen, Run Chen, Julia Hirschberg


Abstract
While recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology produce natural and expressive speech, they lack the option for users to select emotion and control intensity. We propose EmoKnob, a framework that allows fine-grained emotion control in speech synthesis with few-shot demonstrative samples of arbitrary emotion. Our framework leverages the expressive speaker representation space made possible by recent advances in foundation voice cloning models. Based on the few-shot capability of our emotion control framework, we propose two methods to apply emotion control on emotions described by open-ended text, enabling an intuitive interface for controlling a diverse array of nuanced emotions. To facilitate a more systematic emotional speech synthesis field, we introduce a set of evaluation metrics designed to rigorously assess the faithfulness and recognizability of emotion control frameworks. Through objective and subjective evaluations, we show that our emotion control framework effectively embeds emotions into speech and surpasses emotion expressiveness of commercial TTS services.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.466
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8170–8180
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.466
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.466
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haozhe Chen, Run Chen, and Julia Hirschberg. 2024. EmoKnob: Enhance Voice Cloning with Fine-Grained Emotion Control. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8170–8180, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EmoKnob: Enhance Voice Cloning with Fine-Grained Emotion Control (Chen et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2024.emnlp-main.466.pdf