This paper introduces the VALL-E model, which frames speech synthesis as a language modelling task in which a sequence of audio codec codes are generated conditionally, given a preceding sequence of text (and a speech prompt).
Zeghidour et al. SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec
There are various other similar neural codecs, including Encodec and the Descript Audio Codec, but SoundStream was one of the first and has the most complete description in this journal paper.
This is the new version. Still under construction.