Chun-an Chan

Title: Innovations of Chun-an Chan

Introduction

Chun-an Chan is a prominent inventor based in Mountain View, CA (US). He has made significant contributions to the field of speech synthesis, holding a total of 12 patents. His work focuses on enhancing the expressiveness and prosody of synthesized speech, which has important applications in various technologies.

Latest Patents

One of his latest patents is titled "Two-level speech prosody transfer." This method involves receiving an input text utterance that is to be synthesized into expressive speech with a specific prosody and target voice. The process generates an intermediate synthesized speech representation using a first text-to-speech (TTS) model, ensuring that the intended prosody is preserved. The intermediate representation is then processed by a second TTS model, which includes an encoder and decoder, to produce an output audio signal that reflects the desired prosody and speaker characteristics.

Another notable patent is the "Attention-based clockwork hierarchical variational encoder." This method represents intended prosody in synthesized speech by receiving a text utterance and selecting an utterance embedding that conveys the intended prosody. The method predicts the duration of each syllable in the utterance by decoding a prosodic syllable embedding, utilizing an attention mechanism to analyze linguistic features of each phoneme. This results in generating a series of fixed-length predicted frames based on the syllable's predicted duration.

Career Highlights

Chun-an Chan has established himself as a key figure in the field of speech technology through his innovative patents. His work at Google Inc. has allowed him to collaborate with leading experts in the industry, further advancing the capabilities of speech synthesis.

Collaborations

Some of his notable coworkers include Robert Andrew James Clark and Vincent Wan. Their collaborative efforts contribute to the ongoing development of cutting-edge speech technologies.

Conclusion

Chun-an Chan's contributions to speech synthesis through his innovative patents have significantly impacted the field. His work continues to pave the way for advancements in expressive speech technologies.