Nuance Communications, Inc.

Scansoft, Inc.

Peter Rutten

Bert Van Coile

Justin Fackrell

Geert Coorman

Mario De Bock

Steven Leys

Andre Schenk

Jan DeMoortel

Filip Deprez

Jan De Moortel

Paul A Taylor

Methods and systems for sculpting synthesized speech using a graphic user interface are disclosed. An operator enters a stream of text that is used to produce a stream of target phonetic-units. The stream of target phonetic-units is then submitted to a unit-selection process to produce a stream of selected phonetic-units, each selected phonetic-unit derived from a database of sample phonetic-units. After the stream of sample phonetic-units is selected, an operator can remove various selected phonetic-units from the stream of selected phonetic-units, prune the sample phonetic-database and edit various cost functions using the graphic user interface. The edited speech information can then be submitted to the unit-selection process to produce a second stream of selected phonetic-units.

Method and apparatus for sculpting synthesized speech

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

Growing community of inventors

Ghent, Belgium

Peter Rutten