Synthesis-based pre-selection of suitable units for concatenative speech

• US 7,565,291 B2
• Filed: 05/15/2007
• Issued: 07/21/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 07/05/2000
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Cerence Operating Company (Cerence Inc.)
• Original Assignee: AT&T Intellectual Property I LP (AT&T, Inc.)
• Inventors: Conkie, Alistair D.
• Primary Examiner(s): MCFADDEN, SUSAN IRIS
• Application Number:
  US11/748,849
• Publication Number:
  US 20070282608A1
• Time in Patent Office: 798 Days
• Field of Search: 704/258
• US Class Current: 704/258
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/07 Concatenation rules

Abstract

The instructions on the computer-readable medium control a computing device to perform the steps: selecting at least one phoneme from a triphone unit selection database as at least candidate phoneme for use in speech synthesis, selecting a set of phonemes from the at least one candidate phonemes and synthesizing speech using the selected set of phonemes.

Claims

1. A system for synthesizing speech, the system comprising:

a processor;

a module configured to control the processor to select at least one phoneme unit from a triphone unit selection database as at least one candidate phoneme to use in synthesizing speech;

a module configured to control the processor to select a set of phonemes from the at least one candidate phoneme, the module selecting the set of phonemes by appyling a Viterbi search in a cost process; and

a module configured to control the processor to synthesize speech using the selected set of phonemes.

2. The system of claim 1, further comprising:

a module configured to control the processor to parse received input text into recognizable units that are used to synthesize speech.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein the module configured to control the processor to parse the received input text further:

controls the processor to apply a text normalization process to parse the received text into known words and convert abbreviations into known words; and

controls the processor to apply a syntactic process to perform a grammatical analysis of the known words and identify their associated part of speech.

4. A method for synthesizing speech, the method comprising:

selecting at least one phoneme unit from a triphone unit selecting database as a candidate phoneme to use in synthesizing speech;

selecting a set of phonemes from the at least one candidate phoneme, wherein the selecting applies a Viterbi search in a cost process; and

synthesizing speech using the selected set of phonemes.

5. The method of claim 4, further comprising:

parsing the received input text into recognizable units that are used to synthesize speech.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the step of parsing the received input text further comprises:

applying a text normalization process to parse the received text into known words and convert abbreviations into known words; and

applying a syntactic process to perform a grammatical analysis of the known words and identify their associated part of speech.

7. A tangible computer-readable medium storing a computer program for controlling a computing device to synthesize speech, the instructions comprising:

selecting at least one phoneme unit from a triphone unit selection database as at least one candidate phoneme to use in synthesizing speech;

selecting a set of phonemes from the at least one candidate phoneme, wherein the selecting applies a Viterbi search in a cost process; and

synthesizing speech using the selected set of phonemes.

8. The computer-readable medium of claim 7, wherein the instructions further comprises:

parsing the received text into recognizable units that are used to synthesize speech.

9. The computer-readable medium of claim 8, wherein step of parsing the received input text further comprises:

applying a text normalization process to parse the received text into known words and convert abbreviations into known words; and

applying a syntactic process to perform a grammatical analysis of the known words and identify their associated part of speech.