What’s the difference between WaveNet and Tacotron?

WaveNet and Tacotron are not direct competitors but rather complementary technologies that serve different purposes in the field of audio generation.

WaveNet

WaveNet is primarily focused on waveform generation. It is an autoregressive neural network-based model that directly generates audio waveforms sample by sample. WaveNet has been successful in generating high-quality and realistic audio, making it suitable for applications like text-to-speech synthesis, music generation, and audio effects. Its strength lies in capturing the fine-grained details and nuances of audio signals, producing highly accurate and natural-sounding results. However, WaveNet requires a significant computational cost due to its autoregressive nature, making it more computationally intensive compared to some other models.

Tacotron

On the other hand, Tacotron is a sequence-to-sequence model designed specifically for speech synthesis. It takes in text as input and generates corresponding mel-spectrograms, which are representations of the audio in the frequency domain. These spectrograms are then converted into audio waveforms using a vocoder. Tacotron models excel at converting text into intelligible and natural-sounding speech, focusing on capturing the prosody, rhythm, and intonation of human speech. Tacotron has been widely used in applications such as virtual assistants, voice assistants, and audiobook narration.

While WaveNet and Tacotron can be used in combination, with Tacotron generating mel-spectrograms and WaveNet converting them into audio, they serve different purposes. WaveNet is suitable when the goal is to generate high-quality audio waveforms directly, while Tacotron is specifically designed for converting text into speech. Together, they provide a comprehensive pipeline for text-to-speech synthesis, with Tacotron focusing on the linguistic aspect and WaveNet ensuring the fidelity and realism of the generated audio.

In summary, WaveNet and Tacotron are complementary technologies in the audio generation domain, with WaveNet specializing in waveform generation and Tacotron focusing on text-to-speech synthesis.