Industrial Technology Research Institute

Chi-Shiang Kuo

Chih-Chung Kuo

Jau-Hung Chen

An automatic speech segmentation and verification system and method is disclosed, which has a known text script and a recorded speech corpus corresponding to the known text script. A speech unit segmentor segments the recorded speech corpus into N test speech unit segments referring to the phonetic information of the known text script. Then, a segmental verifier is applied to obtain a confidence measure of syllable segmentation for verifying the correctness of the cutting points of test speech unit segments. A phonetic verifier obtains a confidence measure of syllable verification by using verification models for verifying whether the recorded speech corpus is correctly recorded. Finally, a speech unit inspector integrates the confidence measure of syllable segmentation and the confidence measure of syllable verification to determine whether the test speech unit segment is accepted or not.

Automatic speech segmentation and verification using segment confidence measures

A method of speech segment selection for concatenative synthesis based on prosody-aligned distance measure is disclosed. This method is based on comparison of speech segments segmented from a speech corpus, wherein speech segments are fully prosody-aligned to each other before distortion measure. With prosody alignment embedded in selection process, distortion resulting from possible prosody modification in synthesis could be taken into account objectively in selection phase. In order to carry out the purpose of the present invention, automatic segmentation, pitch marking and PSOLA method work together for prosody alignment. Two distortion measures, MFCC and PSQM are used for comparing two prosody-aligned segments of speech because of human perceptual consideration.

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Yung Kang, Taiwan

Chi-Shiang Kuo