VALL-E -- The Future of Text to Speech?

In this article, we will dive deep into a new and exciting text-to-speech model developed by Microsoft Research, called VALL-E. The paper presenting the work has been released on Jan. 5, 2023, and since then has been gaining much attention online. It is worth noting that as of writing this article, no pre-trained model has been released and the only option currently to battle-test this model is to train it by yourself. Nevertheless, the idea presented in this paper is novel and interesting and worth digging into, regardless of whether I can immediately clone my voice with it or not. The technology of text-to-speech is not new and has been around since the "Voder" -- the first electronic voice synthesizer from Bell Labs in 1939 which required manual operation.