Text selection and recording by feedback and adaptation for development of personalized text-to-speech systems

A voice adaptation system for use with a text-to speech synthesizer, comprising:

• a recorded snippet database having initial snippets;
• a comparison snippet set based on speech from a new speaker;
• required sound units for forming new speaker text;
• wherein the required sound units are generated from a comparison of the snippet set with the recorded snippet;
• a comparison module for performing the comparison by comparing the acoustic proximity between each one of said initial snippets and each one of said comparison snippets;
• and
• text for adapting the recorded snippet database so that synthesized speech has a voice quality of the new speaker, the text provided by an optimal selection algorithm for selecting a limited amount of text representative of the required sound units.

A method for adapting the voice quality of a text-to-speech synthesizer having a recorded snippet database, comprising:

• obtaining a comparison snippets set based on speech from a new speaker;
• retrieving initial snippets from the recorded snippet database;
• providing required sound units for generating text;
• a comparison module for determining the required sound units by comparing the acoustic proximity of each one of said initial snippets and each one of said comparison snippets;
• and
• generating text for the new speaker to read, the text is a smallest subset that contains the required sound units.

A method of constructing a speech synthesizer comprising the steps of:

• comparing the acoustic proximity between each one of a set of initial snippets and each one of a set of comparison snippets to generate a corpus labeled recorded speech;
• obtaining the corpus labeled recorded speech containing a plurality of allophones in a plurality of contexts;
• performing a greedy selection on said corpus to extract a portion of said plurality of allophones based on contextual information;
• using said portion of said plurality of allophones to generate synthesis model components of a speech synthesizer.