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Method and system of runtime acoustic unit selection for speech synthesis

  • US 5,913,193 A
  • Filed: 04/30/1996
  • Issued: 06/15/1999
  • Est. Priority Date: 04/30/1996
  • Status: Expired due to Term
First Claim
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1. A computer readable medium having stored thereon a speech synthesizer, comprising:

  • a speech unit store generated according to the steps of;

    obtaining an estimate of hidden Markov models (HMMs) for a plurality of speech units;

    receiving training data as a plurality of speech waveforms;

    segmenting the speech waveforms by performing the steps of;

    obtaining text associated with the speech waveforms; and

    converting the text into a speech unit stringformed of a plurality of training speech units;

    re-estimating the HMMs based on the training speech units, each HMM having a plurality of states, each state having a corresponding senone; and

    repeating the steps of segmenting and re-estimating until a probability of the parameters of the HMMs generating the plurality of speech waveforms reaches a threshold level; and

    mapping each waveform to one or more states and corresponding senones of the HMMs to form a plurality of instances corresponding to each training speech unit and storing the plurality of instances in the speech unit store; and

    a speech synthesizer component configured to synthesize an input linguistic expression by performing the steps of;

    converting the input linguistic expression into a sequence of input speech units;

    generating a plurality of sequences of instances corresponding to the sequence of input speech units based on the plurality of instances in the speech unit store; and

    generating speech based on one of the sequences of instances having a lowest dissimilarity between adjacent instances in the sequence of instances.

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