  This paper proposes a new model, referred to as the show and speak (SAS)
model that, for the first time, is able to directly synthesize spoken
descriptions of images, bypassing the need for any text or phonemes. The basic
structure of SAS is an encoder-decoder architecture that takes an image as
input and predicts the spectrogram of speech that describes this image. The
final speech audio is obtained from the predicted spectrogram via WaveNet.
Extensive experiments on the public benchmark database Flickr8k demonstrate
that the proposed SAS is able to synthesize natural spoken descriptions for
images, indicating that synthesizing spoken descriptions for images while
bypassing text and phonemes is feasible.
