An overview of voice conversion systems

Voice transformation (VT) aims to change one or more aspects of a speech signal while preserving linguistic information. A subset of VT, Voice conversion (VC) specifically aims to change a source speaker’s speech in such a way that the generated output is perceived as a sentence uttered by a target speaker. Despite many years of research, VC systems still exhibit deficiencies in accurately mimicking a target speaker spectrally and prosodically, and simultaneously maintaining high speech quality. In this work we provide an overview of real-world applications, extensively study existing systems proposed in the literature, and discuss remaining challenges. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.