PHONETICALLY ENRICHED LABELING IN UNIT SELECTION SPEECH SYNTHESIS

• US 20080077407A1
• Filed: 09/26/2006
• Published: 03/27/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 09/26/2006
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: AT&T Corporation (AT&T, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: AT&T Corporation (AT&T, Inc.)
• Inventors: Conkie, Alistair, Kim, Yeon-Jun, Syrdal, Ann K., Beutnagel, Mark
• Application Number:
  US11/535,146
• Publication Number:
  US 20080077407A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/261
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/06 Elementary speech units used in speech synthesisers; Concatenation rules
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/08 Text analysis or generation of parameters for speech synthesis out of text, e.g. grapheme to phoneme translation, prosody generation or stress or intonation determination

Abstract

A system, method and computer-readable media are disclosed for improving speech synthesis. A text-to-speech (TTS) voice database for use in a TTS system is generated by a method comprising labeling a voice database phonemically and applying a pre-/post-vocalic distinction to the phonemic labels to generate a TTS voice database. When a system synthesizes speech using speech units from the TTS voice database, the database provides phonemes for selection using the pre-/post-vocalic distinctions which improve unit selection to render the synthetic speech more natural.

Claims

1. A text-to-speech (TTS) voice database for use in a TTS system, the TTS voice database generated by a method comprising:

labeling a voice database phonemically; and

applying a pre-/post-vocalic distinction to the phonemic labels to generate a TTS voice database, wherein the TTS voice database provides phonemics for selection by a TTS system to generate speech.

2. The TTS voice database of claim 1, wherein applying the pre-/post-vocalic distinction is applied according to syllable boundary information.

3. The TTS voice database of claim 2, wherein the syllable boundary information is provided by a TTS front-end.

4. A text-to-speech (TTS) system comprising:

a module configured to distinguish between pre-vocalic and post-vocalic consonants;

a module configured to perform unit selection based at least in part on the pre-/post-vocalic consonants; and

a module configured to generate speech using the selected units.

5. The TTS system of claim 4, wherein unit selection occurs from an inventory of units having associated pre-/post-vocalic consonant distinctions.

6. The TTS system of claim 4, wherein unit selection, penalties are applied to units that violate syllable boundaries and/or word boundaries when a unit selection algorithm computes costs.

7. The TTS system of claim 6, wherein the costs are at least the target cost and join cost.

8. The TTS system of claim 4, wherein a voice database comprises added phone symbols for post-vocalic consonants.

9. The TTS system of claim 8, wherein in the voice database the phone symbols for pre-vocalic consonants do not have added phone symbols.

10. The TTS system of claim 9, wherein in the voice database, the added phone symbols are applied to dark and syllable final nasals.

11. A method of performing text-to-speech (TTS) systems, the method comprising:

receiving text;

assigning pre-/post-vocalic consonant symbols to the received text;

selecting units of speech from an inventory of speech units utilizing the pre-/post-vocalic consonant symbols; and

synthesizing speech with the selected units.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein assigning pre-/post-vocalic consonant symbols is performed using boundary information.

13. The method of claim 11, wherein the inventory of speech units includes embedded pre-/post-vocalic distinctions.