Global Patent Index - EP 1777697 A3

EP 1777697 A3 20080618 - Method and apparatus for speech synthesis without prosody modification

Title (en)

Method and apparatus for speech synthesis without prosody modification

Title (de)

Verfahren und Vorrichtung zur Sprachsynthese ohne Änderung der Prosodie

Title (fr)

Procédé et appareil de synthèse vocale sans modification de prosodie

Publication

EP 1777697 A3 20080618 (EN)

Application

EP 07002565 A 20011203

Priority

  • EP 01128765 A 20011203
  • US 25116700 P 20001204
  • US 85052701 A 20010507

Abstract (en)

[origin: EP1777697A2] A speech synthesizer is provided that concatenates stored samples of speech units without modifying the prosody of the samples. The present invention is able to achieve a high level of naturalness in synthesized speech with a carefully designed training speech corpus by storing samples based on the prosodic and phonetic context in which they occur. In particular, some embodiments of the present invention limit the training text to those sentences that will produce the most frequent sets of prosodic contexts for each speech unit. Further embodiments of the present invention also provide a multi-tier selection mechanism for selecting a set of samples that will produce the most natural sounding speech.

IPC 8 full level

G10L 13/06 (2006.01); G10L 13/07 (2013.01); G10L 13/08 (2006.01); G10L 13/04 (2013.01)

CPC (source: EP)

G10L 13/07 (2013.01); G10L 13/04 (2013.01)

Citation (search report)

  • [Y] US 6064960 A 20000516 - BELLEGARDA JEROME R [US], et al
  • [A] EP 0984426 A2 20000308 - CANON KK [JP]
  • [XY] HUANG X ET AL: "Recent improvements on Microsoft's trainable text-to-speech system-Whistler", ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING, 1997. ICASSP-97., 1997 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MUNICH, GERMANY 21-24 APRIL 1997, LOS ALAMITOS, CA, USA,IEEE COMPUT. SOC, US, 21 April 1997 (1997-04-21), pages 959 - 962, XP010225955, ISBN: 0-8186-7919-0
  • [XY] HUNT A J ET AL: "Unit selection in a concatenative speech synthesis system using a large speech database", 1996 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING - PROCEEDINGS. (ICASSP). ATLANTA, MAY 7 - 10, 1996, IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING - PROCEEDINGS. (ICASSP), NEW YORK, IEEE, US, vol. VOL. 1 CONF. 21, 7 May 1996 (1996-05-07), pages 373 - 376, XP002133444, ISBN: 0-7803-3193-1
  • [Y] TIEN YING FUNG ET AL: "Concatenating syllables for response generation in spoken language applications", IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING, 2000; PROCEEDINGS, vol. 2, 5 June 2000 (2000-06-05), Istanbul, Turkey, 5-9 June 2000, pages 933 - 936, XP010504877
  • [A] FU-CHIANG CHOU ET AL: "A Chinese text-to-speech system based on part-of-speech analysis, prosodic modeling and non-uniform units", ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING, 1997. ICASSP-97., 1997 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MUNICH, GERMANY 21-24 APRIL 1997, LOS ALAMITOS, CA, USA,IEEE COMPUT. SOC, US, 21 April 1997 (1997-04-21), pages 923 - 926, XP010225946, ISBN: 0-8186-7919-0
  • [A] BIGORGNE D ET AL: "Multilingual PSOLA text-to-speech system", STATISTICAL SIGNAL AND ARRAY PROCESSING. MINNEAPOLIS, APR. 27 - 30, 1993, PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING (ICASSP), NEW YORK, IEEE, US, vol. VOL. 4, 27 April 1993 (1993-04-27), pages 187 - 190, XP010110425, ISBN: 0-7803-0946-4
  • [A] NAKAJIMA S ET AL: "Automatic generation of synthesis units based on context oriented clustering", ICASSP 88: 1988 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND ICASSP 88: 1988 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING (CAT. NO.88CH2561-9) - 11-14 APRIL 1988, 11 April 1988 (1988-04-11), NEW YORK, USA, pages 659 - 662, XP010073228
  • [A] BLACK A W ET AL: "OPTIMISING SELECTION OF UNITS FROM SPEECH DATABASES FOR CONCATENATIVE SYNTHESIS", 4TH EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON SPEECH COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY. EUROSPEECH '95. MADRID, SPAIN, SEPT. 18 - 21, 1995, EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON SPEECH COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY. (EUROSPEECH), MADRID : GRAFICAS BRENS, ES, vol. VOL. 1 CONF. 4, 18 September 1995 (1995-09-18), pages 581 - 584, XP000854776

Designated contracting state (EPC)

AT BE CH CY DE DK ES FI FR GB GR IE IT LI LU MC NL PT SE TR

DOCDB simple family (publication)

EP 1777697 A2 20070425; EP 1777697 A3 20080618; EP 1777697 B1 20130320

DOCDB simple family (application)

EP 07002565 A 20011203