SENDER-RESPONSIVE TEXT-TO-SPEECH PROCESSING

• US 20140019135A1
• Filed: 07/16/2012
• Published: 01/16/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 07/16/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: General Motors LLC (General Motors Company)
• Original Assignee: General Motors LLC (General Motors Company)
• Inventors: Talwar, Gaurav, Zhao, Xufang, Hecht, Ron M.
• Granted Patent: US 9,570,066 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/260
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/033 Voice editing, e.g. manipulating the voice of the synthesiser
• 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 method of speech synthesis including receiving a text input sent by a sender, processing the text input responsive to at least one distinguishing characteristic of the sender to produce synthesized speech that is representative of a voice of the sender, and communicating the synthesized speech to a recipient user of the system.

Claims

1. A method of speech synthesis, comprising the steps of:

(a) receiving, at a text-to-speech system, a text input sent by a sender;

(b) processing, via a processor of the system, the text input responsive to at least one distinguishing characteristic of the sender to produce synthesized speech that is representative of a voice of the sender; and

(c) communicating the synthesized speech to a recipient user of the system.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the at least one distinguishing characteristic is obtained from a former communication between the sender and the recipient.

3. The method of claim 2 wherein the at least one distinguishing characteristic includes at least one of acoustic information or conversational demographic information extracted from a previous voice communication session with the sender.

4. The method of claim 2 wherein the at least one distinguishing characteristic includes textual demographic information extracted from a previous text communication session with the sender.

5. The method of claim 2 wherein the at least one distinguishing characteristic includes behavioral demographic information extracted from a previous voice or text communication with the sender.

6. The method of claim 5 wherein the at least one distinguishing characteristic also includes textual demographic information and at least one of acoustic information or conversational demographic information extracted from a previous voice communication session with the sender.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein the processing step includes using a TTS model selected from a plurality of TTS models in response to the at least one distinguishing characteristic.

8. The method of claim 1 wherein the processing step includes using a TTS model adapted in response to the at least one distinguishing characteristic.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein the processing step includes using a TTS model that was selected from a plurality of TTS models in response to the at least one distinguishing characteristic, and was thereafter adapted in response to the at least one distinguishing characteristic.

10. The method of claim 1 wherein the at least one distinguishing characteristic includes at least one collective attribute representative of a group to which the sender belongs.

11. The method of claim 10 wherein the at least one collective attribute includes at least one of gender, age, ethnicity, dialect, or accent.

12. The method of claim 1 wherein the at least one distinguishing characteristic includes at least one individual attribute that is personal to the sender that created the text input.

13. The method of claim 12 wherein the at least one individual attribute is prosodic and includes at least one of pitch, intonation, pronunciation, stress, articulation rate, tone, loudness, or formant frequencies.

14. The method of claim 1, further comprising the step of adjusting the synthesized speech responsive to the recipient, wherein the parameter is at least one of an articulation rate or courteousness.

15. A computer program product embodied in a computer readable medium and including instructions usable by a computer processor of a TTS system to cause the system to implement steps of a method according to claim 1.

16. A method of speech synthesis, comprising the steps of:

(a) obtaining at least one distinguishing characteristic of a sender during a communication session with the sender;

(b) storing the at least one distinguishing characteristic;

(c) receiving, at a text-to-speech (TTS) system, a text input sent by the sender in a subsequent communication session with the sender;

(d) processing, via a processor of the system, the text input responsive to the stored at least one distinguishing characteristic to produce synthesized speech that is representative of a voice of the sender of the text input; and

(e) communicating the synthesized speech to a user of the system.

17. The method of claim 16, wherein the obtaining step includes:

(a1) receiving, at an automatic speech recognition system, audio from the sender;

(a2) pre-processing the received audio to generate acoustic feature vectors;

(a3) decoding the generated acoustic feature vectors to produce a plurality of speech hypotheses;

(a4) post-processing the speech hypotheses to identify speech in the audio from the sender and to create a transcript of the identified speech; and

(a5) storing the identified speech.

18. The method of claim 17, further comprising the steps of:

estimating a model transformation; and

applying the model transformation to a TTS model to produce an adapted TTS model,

wherein the processing step (d) includes using the adapted TTS model to produce the synthesized speech.

19. The method of claim 18, further comprising the step of identifying the TTS model from among a plurality of possible TTS models, based on the obtained at least one distinguishing characteristic of the sender, and before the step of adapting the TTS model.

20. The method of claim 18, wherein the step of adapting the TTS model is carried out on speech in a voice mail message from the sender and in response to receiving the voice mail message.