TTS-Portuguese Corpus: a corpus for speech synthesis in Brazilian Portuguese

Speech provides a natural way for human–computer interaction. In particular, speech synthesis systems are popular in different applications, such as personal assistants, GPS applications, screen readers and accessibility tools. However, not all languages are on the same level when in terms of resources and systems for speech synthesis. This work consists of creating publicly available resources for Brazilian Portuguese in the form of a novel dataset along with deep learning models for end-to-end speech synthesis. Such dataset has 10.5 h from a single speaker, from which a Tacotron 2 model with the RTISI-LA vocoder presented the best performance, achieving a 4.03 MOS value. The obtained results are comparable to related works covering English language and the state-of-the-art in European Portuguese. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001, as well as CNPq (National Council of Technological and Scientific Development) Grant 304266/2020-5