Morpho-VITS: Variational Inference with Morphological Modeling for End-to-End Speech Synthesis of a Tonal Bantu Language

Text-to-speech models for Bantu tonal languages are challenged by a tonal system that is rooted in both the lexis (i.e., the inventory of words, stems, and affixes) and the grammar (i.e., morpho-syntax). To complicate matters, the standard writing systems of these languages often omit tone markings