Reducing recording time when constructing a concatenative tts voice using a reduced script and pre-recorded speech assets

A system for minimizing recording time needed for creating a concatenative TTS voice comprising:

• a recognizer configured to generate a plurality of speech assets from audio recordings containing speech, wherein said recognizer receives pre-recorded audio that includes recorded phrases used by a speech user interface to generate a pre-recorded set of speech assets;
• a reduced script construction engine configured to generate a reduced script that is able to produce a reduced set of speech assets, wherein combining said reduced set with the pre-recorded set results in a unit selective synthesis concatenative TTS voice that has complete phonetic coverage, wherein the reduced script construction engine is optimized to minimize redundancy in phonetic coverage between the pre-recorded set and the reduced set.

A reduced concatenative text-to-speech (TTS) script for use in generating a concatenative text-to-speech voice comprising:

• an automatically generated document comprising a minimal set of phrases to be spoken by a voice talent to generate a reduced recording, wherein said reduced recording is able to be processed by a speech recognition processor to generate a reduced set of concatenative TTS assets, wherein a union of the reduced set and a pre-recorded set of concatenative TTS assets results in a complete set of TTS assets needed for a complete concatenative TTS voice, and wherein the pre-recorded set is generated from pre-recorded audio.