System and Method for Testing a TTS Voice

• US 20100100385A1
• Filed: 12/23/2009
• Published: 04/22/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 09/27/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Cerence Operating Company (Cerence Inc.)
• Original Assignee: AT&T Corporation (AT&T, Inc.)
• Inventors: Fetters, Shane, Davis, Steven Lawrence, Gustafson, Beverly, Schulz, David Eugene, Loney, Louise
• Granted Patent: US 8,073,694 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/260
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/00 Speech synthesis; Text to speech systems

Abstract

Disclosed are various elements of a toolkit used for generating a TTS voice for use in a spoken dialog system. The invention in each case may be in the form of the system, a computer-readable medium or a method for generating the TTS voice. An embodiment of the invention relates to a method for preparing a text-to-speech (TTS) voice for testing and verification. The method comprises processing a TTS voice to be ready for testing, synthesizing words utilizing the TTS voice, presenting to a person a smallest possible subset that contains at least N instances of a group of units in the TTS voice, receiving information from the person associated with corrections needed to the TTS voice and making corrections to the TTS voice according to the received information.

Claims

1. A method for preparing a text-to-speech (TTS) voice for testing and verification, the method comprising:

processing a TTS voice to be ready for testing;

synthesizing words utilizing the TTS voice;

presenting to a person a smallest possible subset that contains at least N instances of a group of units in the TTS voice;

receiving information from the person associated with corrections needed to the TTS voice; and

making corrections to the TTS voice according to the received information.