Methods and apparatus for rapid acoustic unit selection from a large speech corpus
First Claim
1. A computer-implemented method of synthesizing speech, the method comprising:
- selecting a pair of acoustic units from an acoustic unit database;
identifying a concatenation cost between the pair of acoustic units based on communication with a concatenation cost database; and
synthesizing speech using the concatenation cost for the selected pair of acoustic units.
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Abstract
A speech synthesis system can select recorded speech fragments, or acoustic units, from a very large database of acoustic units to produce artificial speech. The selected acoustic units are chosen to minimize a combination of target and concatenation costs for a given sentence. However, as concatenation costs, which are measures of the mismatch between sequential pairs of acoustic units, are expensive to compute, processing can be greatly reduced by pre-computing and aching the concatenation costs. Accordingly, a method is disclosed for constructing an efficient concatenation cost database by synthesizing a large body of speech, identifying the acoustic unit sequential pairs generated and their respective concatention costs, and storing those concatenation costs likely to occur.
33 Citations
25 Claims
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1. A computer-implemented method of synthesizing speech, the method comprising:
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selecting a pair of acoustic units from an acoustic unit database; identifying a concatenation cost between the pair of acoustic units based on communication with a concatenation cost database; and synthesizing speech using the concatenation cost for the selected pair of acoustic units. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
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9. A concatenation cost database stored in a computer-readable medium, the concatenation cost database generated according to a method comprising:
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identifying at least some acoustic units to prune an acoustic unit database; and storing in a concatenation cost database, concatenation costs for sequential acoustic units associated with the pruned acoustic unit database.
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10. A computer-readable medium storing instructions for controlling a computing device, the instructions comprising:
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selecting a pair of acoustic units from an acoustic unit database; identifying a concatenation cost between the pair of acoustic units based on communication with a concatenation cost database; and synthesizing speech using the concatenation cost for the selected pair of acoustic units. - View Dependent Claims (11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17)
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18. A system for synthesizing speech, the system comprising:
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a module configured to select a pair of acoustic units from an acoustic unit database; a module configured to identify a concatenation cost between the pair of acoustic units based on communication with a concatenation cost database; and a module configured to synthesize speech using the concatenation cost for the selected pair of acoustic units. - View Dependent Claims (19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25)
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Specification