Method and system for generating natural sounding concatenative synthetic speech
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorDavid E. Reich
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A method for generating synthetic speech can include identifying a recording of conversational speech and creating a transcription of the conversational speech. Using the transcription, rather than a predefined script, the recording can be analyzed and acoustic units extracted. Each acoustic unit can include a phoneme and/or a sub-phoneme. The acoustic units can be stored so that a concatenative text-to-speech engine can later splice the acoustic units together to produce synthetic speech.
Claims21
A method for generating synthetic speech comprising the steps of:
- identifying a recording of conversational speech;
- identifying a plurality of acoustic units from said recording, wherein each said acoustic unit includes at least one of a phoneme and a sub-phoneme;
- extracting said acoustic units from said recording;
- and,
- storing said acoustic units for use by a concatenative text-to-speech engine to generate synthetic speech.
A system for synthetically generating speech comprising:
- a training corpus containing at least one conversational speech recording and at least one associated transcription;
- an acoustic unit store configured to store a plurality of acoustic units, wherein at least a portion of said acoustic units are generated from data contained within said training corpus, and wherein at least a portion of said acoustic units are derived from said conversational speech recording;
- and,
- a concatenative text-to-speech engine configured to utilize said acoustic unit store to synthetically generate speech.
A machine-readable storage having stored thereon, a computer program having a plurality of code sections, said code sections executable by a machine for causing the machine to perform the steps of:
- identifying a recording of conversational speech;
- identifying a plurality of acoustic units from said recording, wherein each said acoustic unit includes at least one of a phoneme and a sub-phoneme;
- extracting said acoustic units from said recording;
- and,
- storing said acoustic units for use by a concatenative text-to-speech engine to generate synthetic speech.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.