Generating Synthetic Audio Data for Attention-Based Speech Recognition Systems

Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) led to the development of flexible multi-speaker end-to-end TTS systems. We extend state-of-the-art attention-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems with synthetic audio generated by a TTS system trained only on the ASR corpora itself. ASR and TTS systems are built separately to show that text-only data can be used to enhance existing end-to-end ASR systems without the necessity of parameter or architecture changes. We compare our method with language model integration of the same text data and with simple data augmentation methods like SpecAugment and show that performance improvements are mostly independent. We achieve improvements of up to 33% relative in word-error-rate (WER) over a strong baseline with data-augmentation in a low-resource environment (LibriSpeech-100h), closing the gap to a comparable oracle experiment by more than 50%. We also show improvements of up to 5% relative WER over our most recent ASR baseline on LibriSpeech-960h.