Nuance Communications, Inc.

Scansoft, Inc.

Bert Van Coile

Geert Coorman

Peter Rutten

Mario De Bock

Justin Fackrell

Jan De Moortel

Steven Leys

Andre Schenk

Jan DeMoortel

Filip Deprez

Vincent Pollet

Stefaan Van Gerven

A system and method generate synthesized speech through concatenation of speech segments that are derived from a large prosodically-rich corpus of speech segments including using an additional dictionary of speech segment identifier sequences.

Corpus-based speech synthesis based on segment recombination

A high quality speech synthesizer in various embodiments concatenates speech waveforms referenced by a large speech database. Speech quality is further improved by speech unit selection and concatenation smoothing.

Speech synthesis using concatenation of speech waveforms

A method of prosody translation is given. A target input symbol sequence is provided, including a first set of speech prosody descriptors. An instance-based learning algorithm is applied to a corpus of speech unit descriptors to select an output symbol sequence representative of the target input symbol sequence and including a second set of speech prosody descriptors. The second set differs from the first set.

Corpus-based prosody translation system

A synthesis method for concatenative speech synthesis is provided for efficiently concatenating waveform segments in the time-domain. A digital waveform provider produces an input sequence of digital waveform segments. A waveform concatenator concatenates the input segments by using waveform blending within a concatenation zone to synchronize, weight, and overlap-add selected portions of the input segments to produce a single digital waveform. The synchronizing includes determining a minimum weighted energy anchor in the selected portion of each input segment and aligning synchronization peaks in a local vicinity of each anchor.

Fast waveform synchronization for concentration and time-scale modification of speech

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Bruges, Belgium

Bert Van Coile