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(11) |
EP 1 860 646 A3 |
| (12) |
EUROPEAN PATENT APPLICATION |
| (88) |
Date of publication A3: |
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03.09.2008 Bulletin 2008/36 |
| (43) |
Date of publication A2: |
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28.11.2007 Bulletin 2007/48 |
| (22) |
Date of filing: 27.03.2003 |
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| (51) |
International Patent Classification (IPC):
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| (84) |
Designated Contracting States: |
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DE FI FR GB NL |
| (30) |
Priority: |
29.03.2002 US 369043
14.01.2003 US 341869
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| (62) |
Application number of the earlier application in accordance with Art. 76 EPC: |
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03100795.8 / 1394769 |
| (71) |
Applicant: AT&T Corp. |
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New York, NY 10013-2412 (US) |
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| (72) |
Inventors: |
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- Conkie, Alistair, D.
Morris County, NJ 07960 (US)
- Kim, Yeon-Jun
Morris County, NJ 07981 (US)
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| (74) |
Representative: Suckling, Andrew Michael |
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Marks & Clerk
4220 Nash Court
Oxford Business Park South
Oxford
Oxfordshire OX4 2RU
Oxford Business Park South
Oxford
Oxfordshire OX4 2RU (GB) |
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| (54) |
Automatic segmentaion in speech synthesis |
(57) A method for segmenting phone labels to reduce misalignments in order to improve
synthetic speech when the phone labels are concatenated comprises:
training a set of HMMs using one of a specific speaker's hand-labeled speech data
and speaker-independent speech data;
segmenting the trained set of HMMs using an alignment to produce phone labels, wherein
each phone label has a spectral boundary;
using a weighted slope metric to identify bending points of spectral transitions,
wherein each bending point corresponds to a spectral boundary; and
correcting a particular spectral boundary of a particular phone label if the particular
spectral boundary does not coincide with a particular bending point.