Nuance Communications, Inc.

International Business Machines Corporation

Ellen Marie Eide

Wael Mohamed Hamza

Raimo Bakis

Michael Alan Picheny

Maria Elena Smith

Ramesh Ambat Gopinath

Andrew Aaron

Roberto Pieraccini

Jie Z Zeng

Dimitri Kanevsky

Charles Willard Cross, Jr

Vaibhava Goel

Igor Roditis Jablokov

Lalit R Bahl

Peder Andreas Olsen

Salim Estephan Roukos

Osamuyimen Stewart

Satyanarayana Dharanipragada

Zhi Wei Shuang

Charles T Rutherfoord

Raul Fernandez

Liqin Shen

Robert E Donovan

Andy Aaron

Shuang Zhi Wei

A method (and system) of determining confusable list items and resolving this confusion in a spoken dialog system includes receiving user input, processing the user input and determining if a list of items needs to be played back to the user, retrieving the list to be played back to the user, identifying acoustic confusions between items on the list, changing the items on the list as necessary to remove the acoustic confusions, and playing unambiguous list items back to the user.

Method and system for prompt construction for selection from a list of acoustically confusable items in spoken dialog systems

Systems and methods for speech synthesis and, in particular, text-to-speech systems and methods for converting a text input to a synthetic waveform by processing prosodic and phonetic content of a spoken example of the text input to accurately mimic the input speech style and pronunciation. Systems and methods provide an interface to a TTS system to allow a user to input a text string and a spoken utterance of the text string, extract prosodic parameters from the spoken input, and process the prosodic parameters to derive corresponding markup for the text input to enable a more natural sounding synthesized speech.

Systems and methods for text-to-speech synthesis using spoken example

An embodiment of the invention is a software tool used to convert text, speech synthesis markup language (SSML), and/or extended SSML to synthesized audio. Provisions are provided to create, view, play, and edit the synthesized speech, including editing pitch and duration targets, speaking type, paralinguistic events, and prosody. Prosody can be provided by way of a sample recording. Users can interact with the software tool by way of a graphical user interface (GUI). The software tool can produce synthesized audio file output in many file formats.

System for tuning synthesized speech

Methods, apparatus, and products are disclosed for providing expressive user interaction with a multimodal application, the multimodal application operating in a multimodal browser on a multimodal device supporting multiple modes of user interaction including a voice mode and one or more non-voice modes, the multimodal application operatively coupled to a speech engine through a VoiceXML interpreter, including: receiving, by the multimodal browser, user input from a user through a particular mode of user interaction; determining, by the multimodal browser, user output for the user in dependence upon the user input; determining, by the multimodal browser, a style for the user output in dependence upon the user input, the style specifying expressive output characteristics for at least one other mode of user interaction; and rendering, by the multimodal browser, the user output in dependence upon the style.

Providing expressive user interaction with a multimodal application

An embodiment of the invention is a software tool used to convert text, speech synthesis markup language (SSML), and or extended SSML to synthesized audio. Provisions are provided to create, view, play, and edit the synthesized speech including editing pitch and duration targets, speaking type, paralinguistic events, and prosody. Prosody can be provided by way of a sample recording. Users can interact with the software tool by way of a graphical user interface (GUI). The software tool can produce synthesized audio file output in many file formats.

A method for generating a frequency warping function comprising preparing the training speech of a source and a target speaker; performing frame alignment on the training speech of the speakers; selecting aligned frames from the frame-aligned training speech of the speakers; extracting corresponding sets of formant parameters from the selected aligned frames; and generating a frequency warping function based on the corresponding sets of formant parameters. The step of selecting aligned frames preferably selects a pair of aligned frames in the middle of the same or similar frame-aligned phonemes with the same or similar contexts in the speech of the source speaker and target speaker. The step of generating a frequency warping function preferably uses the various pairs of corresponding formant parameters in the corresponding sets of formant parameters as key positions in a piecewise linear frequency warping function to generate the frequency warping function.

Generating a frequency warping function based on phoneme and context

A technique for masking latency in an automatic dialog system is provided. A communication is received from a user at the automatic dialog system. The communication is processed in the automatic dialog system to provide a response. At least one transitional message is provided to the user from the automatic dialog system while processing the communication. A response is provided to the user from the automatic dialog system in accordance with the received communication from the user.

Methods and apparatus for masking latency in text-to-speech systems

A driving directions system loads into memory a limited subset of prerecorded, spoken utterances of geographic names from a mass media storage. The subset of spoken utterances may be limited, for example, to the geographic names within a predetermined radius (e.g., a few miles) of the driver's present location. The present location of the driver may be manually entered into the driving directions system by the driver, or automatically determined using a global positioning system ('GPS') receiver. As the vehicle moves from its present location, the driving directions system loads into memory new names from the mass media storage and overwrites, if necessary, those which are now geographically out of range. Based on the current location of the driving, the driving directions system can audibly output geographic names from the run-time memory.

On demand TTS vocabulary for a telematics system

A text-to-speech system that includes an arrangement for accepting text input, an arrangement for providing synthetic speech output, and an arrangement for imparting emotion-based features to synthetic speech output. The arrangement for imparting emotion-based features includes an arrangement for accepting instruction for imparting at least one emotion-based paradigm to synthetic speech output, as well as an arrangement for applying at least one emotion-based paradigm to synthetic speech output.

Application of emotion-based intonation and prosody to speech in text-to-speech systems

A system and method for rescoring the N-best hypotheses from an automatic speech recognition system by comparing an original speech waveform to synthetic speech waveforms that are generated for each text sequence of the N-best hypotheses. A distance is calculated from the original speech waveform to each of the synthesized waveforms, and the text associated with the synthesized waveform that is determined to be closest to the original waveform is selected as the final hypothesis. The original waveform and each synthesized waveform are aligned to a corresponding text sequence on a phoneme level. The mean of the feature vectors which align to each phoneme is computed for the original waveform as well as for each of the synthesized hypotheses. The distance of a synthesized hypothesis to the original speech signal is then computed as the sum over all phonemes in the hypothesis of the Euclidean distance between the means of the feature vectors of the frames aligning to that phoneme for the original and the synthesized signals. The text of the hypothesis which is closest under the above metric to the original waveform is chosen as the final system output.

System and method for rescoring N-best hypotheses of an automatic speech recognition system

A technique for producing speech output in a text-to-speech system is provided. A message is created for communication to a user in a natural language generator of the text-to-speech system. The message is annotated in the natural language generator with a synthetic speech output style. The message is conveyed to the user through a speech synthesis system in communication with the natural language generator, wherein the message is conveyed in accordance with the synthetic speech output style.

Methods and apparatus for conveying synthetic speech style from a text-to-speech system

A method, apparatus and a computer program product to generate an audible speech word that corresponds to text. The method includes providing a text word and, in response to the text word, processing pre-recorded speech segments that are derived from a plurality of speakers to selectively concatenate together speech segments based on at least one cost function to form audio data for generating an audible speech word that corresponds to the text word. A data structure is also provided for use in a concatenative text-to-speech system that includes a plurality of speech segments derived from a plurality of speakers, where each speech segment includes an associated attribute vector each of which is comprised of at least one attribute vector element that identifies the speaker from which the speech segment was derived.

Method, apparatus and computer program providing a multi-speaker database for concatenative text-to-speech synthesis

Systems and methods for dynamically selecting among text-to-speech (TTS) systems. Exemplary embodiments of the systems and methods include identifying text for converting into a speech waveform, synthesizing said text by three TTS systems, generating a candidate waveform from each of the three systems, generating a score from each of the three systems, comparing each of the three scores, selecting a score based on a criteria and selecting one of the three waveforms based on the selected of the three scores.

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Tarrytown, NY, United States of America

Ellen Marie Eide