Developing multilingual speech synthesis system for Ojibwe, Mi'kmaq, and Maliseet

Shenran Wang, Changbing Yang, Mike Parkhill, Chad Quinn, Christopher Hammerly, Jian Zhu

Abstract: We present lightweight flow matching multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) systems for Ojibwe, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet, three Indigenous languages in North America. Our results show that training a multilingual TTS model on three typologically similar languages can improve the performance over monolingual models, especially when data are scarce. Attention-free architectures are highly competitive with self-attention architecture with higher memory efficiency. Our research provides technical development to language revitalization for low-resource languages but also highlights the cultural gap in human evaluation protocols, calling for a more community-centered approach to human evaluation.