Prosody-pattern generating apparatus, speech synthesizing apparatus, and computer program product and method thereof
AssigneeKabushiki Kaisha Toshiba
InventorsTakashi Masuko, Masami Akamine
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Normalization parameters are generated at a normalization-parameter generating unit by calculating the mean values and the standard deviations of an initial prosody pattern and a prosody pattern of a training sentence of a speech corpus. Then, the variance range or variance width of the initial prosody pattern is normalized at the prosody-pattern normalizing unit in accordance with the normalization parameters. As a result, a prosody pattern similar to speech of human beings and improved in naturalness can be generated with a small amount of calculation.
Claims7
A prosody-pattern generating apparatus comprising:
- an initial-prosody-pattern generating unit that generates an initial prosody pattern based on language information and a prosody model which is obtained by modeling prosody information in units of phonemes, syllables and words that constitute speech data;
- a normalization-parameter generating unit that generates, as normalization parameters, mean values and standard deviations of the initial prosody pattern and a prosody pattern of a training sentence included in a speech corpus, respectively;
- a normalization-parameter storing unit that stores the normalization parameters;
- and
- a prosody-pattern normalizing unit that normalizes a variance range or a variance width of the initial prosody pattern, bringing the variance range or the variance width of the initial prosody pattern to the same level as a variance range or a variance width of the prosody pattern of the training sentence in the speech corpus in accordance with the normalization parameters.
A computer program product having a non-transitory computer readable medium storing programmed instructions for generating a prosody pattern, wherein the instructions, when executed by a computer, cause the computer to perform:
- generating an initial prosody pattern based on language information and a prosody model which is obtained by modeling prosody information in units of phonemes, syllables and words that constitute speech data;
- generating, as normalization parameters, mean values and standard deviations of the initial prosody pattern and a prosody pattern of a training sentence included in a speech corpus,
- respectively;
- storing the normalization parameters in a storing unit;
- and
- normalizing a variance range or a variance width of the initial prosody pattern, bringing the variance range or the variance width of the initial prosody pattern to the same level as a variance range or a variance width of the prosody pattern of the training sentence in the speech corpus in accordance with the normalization parameters.
A prosody-pattern generating method comprising:
- generating an initial prosody pattern based on language information and a prosody model which is obtained by modeling prosody information in units of phonemes, syllables, and words that constitute speech data;
- generating, as normalization parameters, mean values and standard deviations of the initial prosody pattern and a prosody pattern of a training sentence included in a speech corpus,
- respectively;
- storing the normalization parameters in a storing unit;
- and
- normalizing a variance range or a variance width of the initial prosody pattern, bringing the variance range or the variance width of the initial prosody pattern to the same level as a variance range or a variance width of the prosody pattern of the training sentence in the speech corpus in accordance with the normalization parameters.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.