Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Kazue Hata

Nicholas Kibre

Frode Holm

Stephen L Johnson

Steve D Pearson

Brian A Hanson

Rhonda Shaw

Ronald B Richard

Yoshizumi Terada

Judson Hofmann

Prosody templates, constructed during system design, store intonation (F,) and duration information based on syllabic stress patterns for the target word. The prosody templates are constructed so that words exhibiting the same stress pattern will be assigned the same prosody template. The prosody template information is preferably stored in a normalized form to reduce noise level in the statistical measures. The synthesizer uses a word dictionary that specifies the stress patterns associated with each stored word. These stress patterns are used to access the prosody template database. F,and duration information is then extracted from the selected template, de-normalized and applied to the phonemic information to produce a natural human-sounding prosody in the synthesized output.

Speech synthesis employing prosody templates

A method of separating high-level prosodic behavior from purely articulatory constraints so that timing information can be extracted from human speech is presented. The extracted timing information is used to construct duration templates that are employed for speech synthesis. The duration templates are constructed so that words exhibiting the same stress pattern will be assigned the same duration template. Initially, the words of input text segmented into phonemes and syllables, and the associated stress pattern is assigned. The stress assigned words are then assigned grouping features by a text grouping module. A phoneme cluster module groups the phonemes into phoneme pairs and single phonemes. A static duration associated with each phoneme pair and single phoneme is retrieved from a global static table. A normalization module generates a normalized syllable duration value based upon the retrieved static durations associated with the phonemes that comprise the syllable. The normalized syllable duration value is stored in a duration template based upon the grouping features associated with that syllable. To produce natural human-sounding prosody in synthesized speech, the duration information is then extracted from the selected template, de-normalized and applied to the phonemic information.

Generation and synthesis of prosody templates

The operating system or application program generates events captured by an event handler mechanism that, in turn, invokes message assembler and graphics assembler modules. The message assembler constructs pseudo-random sentences or notification messages based on the type of event captured and optionally upon selected state variables. The message assembler supplies text strings to a text-to-speech engine. A linguistic database containing a lexicon of predefined words supplies text data that the message assembler concatenates to form the text strings. Text strings are assembled and optionally tagged to alter the message, speaking voice and inflection based on the nature of the message and its context. Graphics elements are assembled by a graphics assembler in response to the event handler and based on optionally supplied user-defined graphics parameters.

Message assembler using pseudo randomly chosen words in finite state

An electronic news receiving device receives text data for an electronic edition of a newspaper in the evening and audibly reads the newspaper to the user the next day. The newsreader includes a receiver which receives an electronic edition of a newspaper transmitted by a transmitter at an electronic news preparer's facility. The news preparer may mark words that do not conform to conventional letter-to-sound rules with a pronunciation flag and provide pronunciation data for the words with the electronic edition of the newspaper. The data may be compressed by providing a dictionary in the news receiving device and, at the preparer's facility, translating each word into a dictionary address. The transmission channel may include a telephone line, the vertical blanking interval of a television signal, a cable television channel, an AM/FM subcarrier signal or a satellite channel. The received electronic edition of the newspaper is processed by a section filter to retain desired sections of the newspaper and to discard unwanted sections. The retained news articles are stored in memory. A text-to-speech converter produces an audible output corresponding to the spoken text of the news articles. A user can input one or more keywords to cause the device to selectively read articles containing the keywords. The text to speech converter of the device uses rules and a dictionary to provide syntactic and semantic prosody for morpheme reconstructions. The user may determine which articles are read and may vary the rate at which articles are read using manual controls or spoken commands.

Electronic news reception apparatus that selectively retains sections

Computer-stored text, such as numerical information, is processed by a word list generator to develop a word list corresponding to those words that are to be spoken by the system. The word list generator assigns a prosodic environment state or token to each entry in the list. The prosodic environment identifies how the word functions in its current prosodic context. Different intonations are applied based on the prosodic environment. Next, the preceding and adjacent words are examined to determine how each word may need to be pronounced differently, based on the ending phoneme of the preceding word and the beginning phoneme of the following word. Using this phonological information along with the prosodic information, a sample list is generated by accessing a dictionary of stored samples. The sample list is then serially played through suitable digital-to-analog conversion circuitry to generate the text-to-speech output. The result is a natural, human-like reading, complete with appropriate intonation changes suitable to the context of the text material.

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Santa Barbara, CA, United States of America

Kazue Hata