System and method for performing speech synthesis with a cache of phoneme sequences

• US 8,214,217 B2
• Filed: 07/13/2011
• Issued: 07/03/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 08/09/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: AT&T Intellectual Property II LP (AT&T, Inc.)
• Inventors: Conkie, Alistair D.
• Primary Examiner(s): AZAD, ABUL K
• Application Number:
  US13/182,082
• Publication Number:
  US 20120010877A1
• Time in Patent Office: 356 Days
• Field of Search: 704258-269
• US Class Current: 704/260
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/04 Details of speech synthesis systems, e.g. synthesiser structure or memory management
• 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

Disclosed are systems, methods, and computer readable media for performing speech synthesis. The method embodiment comprises applying a first part of a speech synthesizer to a text corpus to obtain a plurality of phoneme sequences, the first part of the speech synthesizer only identifying possible phoneme sequences, for each of the obtained plurality of phoneme sequences, identifying joins that would be calculated to synthesize each of the plurality of respective phoneme sequences, and adding the identified joins to a cache for use in speech synthesis.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

extracting, via a processor, at a first time a plurality of phoneme sequences from a text corpus, where a phoneme sequence within the plurality of phoneme sequences occurs at least twice within the text corpus;

identifying joins calculated to synthesize the phoneme sequence to yield identified joins; and

storing the identified joins in a cache for use in speech synthesis at a second time that is later than the first time.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

recording a frequency of occurrence for each of the plurality of phoneme sequences; and

pruning the cache based on the frequency of occurrence.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

building a plurality of caches of different sizes based on at least one of values and parameters.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the values and parameters comprise at least one of computational costs and frequency of occurrence.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

optimizing the cache based on frequency of occurrence of the identified joins.

6. The method of claim 2, wherein the cache is pruned using at least one of a static method and a dynamic method.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

recording use instances of each join in the cache.

8. A system comprising:

a processor; and

a non-transitory computer-readable memory having stored therein instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform a method comprising;

extracting, at a first time a plurality of phoneme sequences from a text corpus, where a phoneme sequence within the plurality of phoneme sequences occurs more than once within the text corpus;

identifying joins calculated to synthesize the phoneme sequence to yield identified joins;

storing the identified joins in a cache for use in speech synthesis at a second time that is later than the first time; and

performing speech synthesis using the identified joins.

9. The system of claim 8, the instructions stored in the non-transitory computer-readable memory further comprising:

recording a frequency of occurrence for each of the plurality of phoneme sequences; and

pruning the cache based on the frequency of occurrence.

10. The system of claim 8, the method further comprising:

building a plurality of caches of different sizes based on at least one of values and parameters.

11. The system of claim 8, wherein the values and parameters comprise at least one of computational costs and frequency of occurrence.

12. The system of claim 8, wherein the cache is optimized based on frequency of occurrence of the identified joins.

13. The system of claim 9, wherein the cache is pruned using at least one of a static method and a dynamic method.

14. The system of claim 8, wherein the cache further comprises instances of each join in the identified joins.

15. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having stored therein instructions which, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform steps comprising:

extracting, at a first time, a plurality of phoneme sequences from a text corpus, where a phoneme sequence within the plurality of phoneme sequences occurs more than once within the text corpus;

identifying joins calculated to synthesize the phoneme sequence to yield identified joins; and

storing the identified joins in a cache for use in speech synthesis at a second time that is later than the first time.

16. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 15, the instructions further comprising:

recording a frequency of occurrence for each of the plurality of phoneme sequences; and

pruning the cache based on the frequency of occurrence.

17. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 15, the instructions further comprising:

building a plurality of caches of different sizes based on at least one of values and parameters.

18. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 15, wherein the values and parameters comprise at least one of computational costs and frequency of occurrence.

19. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 15, the instructions further comprising:

optimizing the cache based on frequency of occurrence of the identified joins.

20. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 16, wherein the cache is pruned using at least one of a static method and a dynamic method.