Speech unit selection using HMM acoustic models
First Claim
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1. A method for selecting speech units in a concatenative speech synthesizer comprising:
- obtaining a representative measure indicative of a difference between HMM acoustic models of speech unitsselecting a speech unit to be used by a speech synthesizer based on the representative measure.
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Abstract
A concatenating speech synthesizer concatenates selected speech units to obtain the desired synthesized speech. When desired speech units of phonetic and/or prosodic context are not available, the synthesizer selects replacement speech units based on measures representative of the difference between the HMM acoustic models of the desired speech unit and available speech units.
296 Citations
20 Claims
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1. A method for selecting speech units in a concatenative speech synthesizer comprising:
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obtaining a representative measure indicative of a difference between HMM acoustic models of speech units selecting a speech unit to be used by a speech synthesizer based on the representative measure. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)
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12. A method of synthesizing speech comprising:
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receiving input text and parsing the input text to obtain phonetic one or both prosodic information; generating context vectors based on the phonetic one or both prosodic information; generating cost measures corresponding to the context vectors, the cost measures being based on a comparison of acoustic HMM models of speech units; selecting one or more speech units based on the context vectors and corresponding cost measures when speech units having desired context vectors are not available; concatenating the one or more selected speech units to form a synthesized speech output representing the input text. - View Dependent Claims (13, 14, 15, 16)
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17. A speech synthesizer comprising:
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a store of speech units indicative of at least one of different phonetic and different prosodic contexts; a set of cost measures associated with the speech units of the store of speech units, the cost measures being indicative of a comparison of acoustic HMM models of speech units of said at least one of different phonetic and different prosodic contexts; and a speech unit locator configured to select speech units to be used for forming synthesized speech based on accessing the set of cost measures when desired speech units of at least one of phonetic and prosodic contexts are not available in the store of speech units. - View Dependent Claims (18, 19, 20)
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Specification