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US 2004/0111266 A1Published application
Speech synthesis using concatenation of speech waveforms
AssigneeNuance Communications, Inc.
InventorsGeert Coorman, Filip Deprez, Mario De Bock, Justin Fackrell, Steven Leys, Peter Rutten, Jan DeMoortel, Andre Schenk, Bert Van Coile
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A high quality speech synthesizer in various embodiments concatenates speech waveforms referenced by a large speech database. Speech quality is further improved by speech unit selection and concatenation smoothing.
Claims7
A system for speech unit selection comprising:
- a large speech database referencing speech waveforms and associated symbolic prosodic features, wherein the speech database is accessed by speech waveform designators, at least one designator being associated with a sequence of one or more diphones;
- and
- a speech waveform selector, in communication with the speech database, that selects based, at least in part, on the symbolic prosodic features stored in the speech database, waveforms referenced by the speech database.
A system for speech unit selection comprising:
- a large speech database referencing speech waveforms;
- a speech waveform selector, in communication with the speech database, that selects waveforms referenced by the speech database using criteria that, at least in part, favor (i) waveform candidates based directly on high level prosody features, and (ii) approximately equally all waveform candidates having low level prosody features within a target range determined as a function of high level linguistic features.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.