Nuance Communications, Inc.

Cerence Operating Company

Svox Ag

Johan Wouters

Nils Lenke

Charles L Ortiz, Jr

Jürgen Keller

Adam Emfield

Christof Traber

Sumanta Chakraborty

Martin Reber

Geert Coorman

Corinne Bos-Plachez

Binh Dac Nguyen

Christian Ardelean

Igor Nozhov

Paolo Mairano

Michael Kaisser

Sourav Nandy

Marcel Riedi

Silvia Maria Antonella Quazza

Robert M Policano

Dong-Jian Yue

David Hagstrand

Alexis Wilpert

Schamai Safra

Bleicke Holm

A vehicle control system executing a voice control system for facilitating voice-based dialog with a driver to enable the driver or autonomous vehicle to control certain operational aspects of an autonomous vehicle is provided. Using environmental and sensor input, the vehicle control system can select optimal routes for operating the vehicle in an autonomous mode or choose a preferred operational mode. Occupants of the autonomous vehicle can change a destination, route or driving mode by engaging with the vehicle control system in a dialog enabled by the voice control system.

Methods and systems for increasing autonomous vehicle safety and flexibility using voice interaction

A method, computer program product, and computing system for monitoring an interior environment of a motor vehicle; determining a personal state of an occupant within the interior environment of the motor vehicle; and interacting with the occupant based, at least in part, upon the personal state of the occupant.

Interaction system and method

A text-to-speech (TTS) system includes components capable of supporting the generation of speech output in any of multiple styles, and may switch seamlessly from producing speech output in one style to producing speech output in another style. For example, a concatenative TTS system may include a speech base storing speech units associated with multiple speech styles, and a linguistic analysis component to generate a phonetic transcription specifying speech output in any of multiple styles. Text input may include a style indication associated with a particular segment of the input text. The linguistic analysis component may invoke encoded rules and/or components based upon the style indication, and generate a phonetic transcription specifying a speech style, which may be processed to generate output speech.

Systems and methods for generating speech of multiple styles from text

The method provides a spectral speech description to be used for synthesis of a speech utterance, where at least one spectral envelope input representation is received. In one solution the improvement is made by manipulation an extremum, i.e. a peak or a valley, in the rapidly varying component of the spectral envelope representation. The rapidly varying component of the spectral envelope representation is manipulated to sharpen and/or accentuate extrema after which it is merged back with the slowly varying component or the spectral envelope input representation to create an enhanced spectral envelope final representation. In other solutions a complex spectrum envelope final representation is created with phase information derived from one of the group delay representation of a real spectral envelope input representation corresponding to a short-time speech signal and a transformed phase component of the discrete complex frequency domain input representation corresponding to the speech utterance.

Speech enhancement techniques on the power spectrum

A speech output is generated from a text input written in a first language and containing inclusions in a second language. Words in the native language are pronounced with a native pronunciation and words in the foreign language are pronounced with a proficient foreign pronunciation. Language dependent phoneme symbols generated for words of the second language are replaced with language dependent phoneme symbols of the first language, where said replacing includes the steps of assigning to each language dependent phoneme symbol of the second language a language independent target phoneme symbol, mapping to each one language independent target phoneme symbol a language independent substitute phoneme symbol assignable to a language dependent substitute phoneme symbol of the first language, substituting the language dependent phoneme symbols of the second language by the language dependent substitute phoneme symbols of the first language.

Text to speech synthesis for texts with foreign language inclusions

A method is disclosed for providing speech parameters to be used for synthesis of a speech utterance. In at least one embodiment, the method includes receiving an input time series of first speech parameter vectors, preparing at least one input time series of second speech parameter vectors consisting of dynamic speech parameters, extracting from the input time series of first and second speech parameter vectors partial time series of first speech parameter vectors and corresponding partial time series of second speech parameter vectors, converting the corresponding partial time series of first and second speech parameter vectors into partial time series of third speech parameter vectors, wherein the conversion is done independently for each set of partial time series and can be started as soon as the vectors of the input time series of the first speech parameter vectors have been received. The speech parameter vectors of the partial time series of third speech parameter vectors are combined to form a time series of output speech parameter vectors to be used for synthesis of the speech utterance. At least one embodiment of the method allows a continuous providing of speech parameter vectors for synthesis of the speech utterance. The latency and the memory requirements for the synthesis of a speech utterance are reduced.

Speech synthesis with dynamic constraints

An input linguistic description is converted into a speech waveform by deriving at least one target unit sequence corresponding to the linguistic description, selecting from a waveform unit database for the target unit sequences a plurality of alternative unit sequences approximating the target unit sequences, concatenating the alternative unit sequences to alternative speech waveforms and presenting the alternative speech waveforms to an operating person and enabling the choice of one of the presented alternative speech waveforms. There are no iterative cycles of manual modification and automatic selection, which enables a fast way of working. The operator does not need knowledge of units, targets, and costs, but chooses from a set of given alternatives. The fine-tuning of TTS prompts therefore becomes accessible to non-experts.

Text to speech synthesis

Growing community of inventors

Cham, Switzerland

Johan Wouters