Voice synthesizer
First Claim
1. In an electronic device for phonetically synthesizing human speech includinginput means responsive to input data identifying a desired sequence of phonemes for producing a plurality of control signals that electronically define each phoneme in said desired sequence of phonemes, including a first control signal for controlling the amplitude of the voiced component of speech and a second control signal for controlling the amplitude of the unvoiced component of speech;
- vocal source means for producing a voiced excitation signal;
fricative source means for producing an unvoiced excitation signal; and
vocal tract means responsive to said voiced and unvoiced excitation signals and certain of said plurality of control signals for substantially producing the frequency spectrums of each of said desired sequence of phonemes, including a first resonant filter tunable under the control of a third of said control signals for producing the first formant in said frequency spectrums and a second resonant filter serially connected to said first resonant filter and tunable under the control of a fourth of said control signals for producing the second formant in said frequency spectrums;
the improvement comprising controller means for injecting said voiced and unvoiced excitation signals into said vocal tract means including first controller means for injecting excitation energy in parallel into said first and second resonant filters under the control of said first control signal and second controller means for injecting excitation energy into said vocal tract means under the control of said second control signal.
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Accused Products
Abstract
A highly simplified speech synthesizer that is capable of producing quality speech. The present speech synthesizer is adapted to be driven by an 8-bit digital input command word. Six of the bits are used for phoneme selection and the remaining two bits for inflection control. In a first embodiment, the system is adapted to generate twelve parameter control signals for each phoneme, with one of the parameters being utilized to control both high and low frequency fricative injection into the vocal tract. This embodiment also provides asynchronous excitation of the vocal tract by including a second fricative excitation control circuit that is adapted to inject white noise in parallel into the second and third resonant filters under the control of the vocal amplitude control signal. In a second embodiment, one of the twelve signal parameters is utilized as two separate control signals thus effectively providing thirteen control signal parameters. The vocal tract in the second embodiment is also driven asynchronously with the glottal waveform being injected in parallel into both the first and second resonant filters. The second embodiment is also adapted to be operated off a portable power supply. A feature of the second embodiment is a phoneme pause control.
29 Citations
18 Claims
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1. In an electronic device for phonetically synthesizing human speech including
input means responsive to input data identifying a desired sequence of phonemes for producing a plurality of control signals that electronically define each phoneme in said desired sequence of phonemes, including a first control signal for controlling the amplitude of the voiced component of speech and a second control signal for controlling the amplitude of the unvoiced component of speech; -
vocal source means for producing a voiced excitation signal; fricative source means for producing an unvoiced excitation signal; and vocal tract means responsive to said voiced and unvoiced excitation signals and certain of said plurality of control signals for substantially producing the frequency spectrums of each of said desired sequence of phonemes, including a first resonant filter tunable under the control of a third of said control signals for producing the first formant in said frequency spectrums and a second resonant filter serially connected to said first resonant filter and tunable under the control of a fourth of said control signals for producing the second formant in said frequency spectrums; the improvement comprising controller means for injecting said voiced and unvoiced excitation signals into said vocal tract means including first controller means for injecting excitation energy in parallel into said first and second resonant filters under the control of said first control signal and second controller means for injecting excitation energy into said vocal tract means under the control of said second control signal. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15)
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16. In an electronic device for phonetically synthesizing human speech including
vocal source means for producing a voiced excitation signal; -
fricative source means for producing an unvoiced excitation signal; input means responsive to input data identifying a desired sequence of phonemes for producing a plurality of control signals that electronically define each phoneme in said desired sequence of phonemes, including a first control signal for controlling the amplitude of said voiced excitation signal and a second control signal for controlling the amplitude of said unvoiced excitation signal; and vocal tract means responsive to said voiced and unvoiced excitation signals and certain of said plurality of control signals for substantially producing the frequency spectrums of each of said desired sequence of phonemes; the improvement comprising pause control means connected to said input means for producing an output signal that is effective to cause said input means to maintain the current values of certain of said control signals beyond the normal phoneme period whenever both said first and second control signals are absent. - View Dependent Claims (17, 18)
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Specification