Pronunciation guided by automatic speech recognition

A method of determining which of a plurality of pronunciations of a word in a digital phonetic dictionary to use in speech synthesis, the method comprising:

• receiving a spoken utterance from a speaker;
• recognizing from the spoken utterance, using a speech engine, a word that has multiple known pronunciations;
• selecting a preferred pronunciation from the multiple known pronunciations of the word that matches the speaker's pronunciation of the word used in the spoken utterance;
• and
• storing, in a user profile associated with the speaker, an indication of the preferred pronunciation that the speaker used,
• wherein the speech engine uses the stored preferred pronunciation to select between multiple known pronunciations of the word when synthesizing the speaker's future spoken utterances that includes the word.

A method of determining which of a plurality of pronunciations of a word in a phonetic dictionary to use in speech synthesis, the method comprising:

• determining a text word to synthesize, the text word having multiple known pronunciations;
• looking up, in a user profile, a preferred pronunciation of a profile word that has multiple known pronunciations;
• calculating a correlation between the preferred pronunciation of the profile word and each of multiple pronunciations of the text word;
• and
• choosing one of the multiple pronunciations of the text word at least partially based on its correlation to the preferred pronunciation of the profile word.

A method of configuring a phonetic dictionary, the method comprising:

• analyzing, across a multiplicity of users, user's profile word lists for a plurality of pronunciations of at least one word recognized with multiple pronunciations;
• determining, based on the analysis, that a pronunciation most frequently used across the multiplicity of users is a preferred one of the plurality of pronunciations;
• and
• update the phonetic dictionary to indicate the preferred one of the plurality of pronunciations for speech recognition.

A method of improving the accuracy of automatic speech recognition, the method comprising:

• determining, by a speech engine, a multiplicity of phoneme sequence hypotheses from a spoken utterance;
• determining, by the speech engine, a multiplicity of transcription hypotheses, each transcription hypothesis being based on:
• a match between the phoneme sequence hypothesis and a pronunciation of a word in a phonetic dictionary, the word having a plurality of pronunciations;
• and
• an indication of at least one pronunciation being preferred, wherein the preferred pronunciation is determined by frequency of usage determined by crowdsourcing;
• and
• calculating a likelihood score for each transcription hypothesis, the likelihood score being positively correlated to the matched pronunciation being the preferred pronunciation of the word.