Speech synthesizing dolls for mimicking voices of parents and guardians of children
AssigneeSony Corporation
InventorsBrant Candelore, Mahyar Nejat
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Abstract
Speech synthesizing devices and methods are disclosed for using a doll or toy to mimic the voice of a parent or guardian of a child as reading a children's book. A speech synthesizer that employs an artificial neural network can be used to do so, with the artificial neural network being trained using audio recordings of the parent or guardian speaking as well as text corresponding to the words that are spoken by the parent or guardian in the audio recordings. The artificial neural network may then be used to produce various audio outputs in the voice of the parent or guardian as reading a children's book to the parent or guardian's child.
Claims20
A doll, comprising:
- at least one processor;
- and
- at least one speaker accessible to the at least one processor;
- the processor being programmed with instructions to:
- produce a representation of at least a first person as speaking audio.
A method, comprising:
- presenting first text of a book on an electronic display, the electronic display disposed on a toy;
- using a trained artificial neural network (ANN) to audibly produce a representation of at least one person as speaking audio corresponding to the first text.
An apparatus, comprising:
- at least one computer readable storage medium that is not a transitory signal, the at least one computer readable storage medium comprising instructions executable by at least one processor to:
- use a speech synthesizer executing at least in part at child's toy to audibly produce a representation of the child's parent or guardian as speaking audio corresponding to text of a book.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.