Method and apparatus for speech synthesis without prosody modification
US7127396B2 · kind B2 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Jan 6, 2005 |
| Grant date | Oct 24, 2006 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Jan 6, 2025 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG10L13/07
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
A speech synthesizer is provided that concatenates stored samples of speech units without modifying the prosody of the samples. The present invention is able to achieve a high level of naturalness in synthesized speech with a carefully designed training speech corpus by storing samples based on the prosodic and phonetic context in which they occur. In particular, some embodiments of the present invention limit the training text to those sentences that will produce the most frequent sets of prosodic contexts for each speech unit. Further embodiments of the present invention also provide a multi-tier selection mechanism for selecting a set of samples that will produce the most natural sounding speech.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.