Tacotron2

Tacotron 2 is a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text. It consists of two components:

• a recurrent sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network with attention which predicts a sequence of mel spectrogram frames from an input character sequence
• a modified version of WaveNet which generates time-domain waveform samples conditioned on the predicted mel spectrogram frames

In contrast to the original Tacotron, Tacotron 2 uses simpler building blocks, using vanilla LSTM and convolutional layers in the encoder and decoder instead of CBHG stacks and GRU recurrent layers. Tacotron 2 does not use a “reduction factor”, i.e., each decoder step corresponds to a single spectrogram frame. Location-sensitive attention is used instead of additive attention.