Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Rhonda Shaw

Roland Kuhn

Nicholas Kibre

Steve D Pearson

Kazue Hata

Yoshizumi Terada

An editing tool is provided for developing word-pronunciation pairs based on a spelled word input. The editing tool includes a transcription generator that receives the spelled word input from the user and generates a list of suggested phonetic transcriptions. The editor displays the list of suggested phonetic transcriptions to the user and provides a mechanism for selecting the desired pronunciation from the list of suggested phonetic transcriptions. The editing tool further includes a speech recognizer to aid the user in selecting the desired pronunciation from the list of suggested phonetic transcriptions based on speech data input that corresponds to the spelled word input, and a syllable editor that enables the user to manipulate a syllabic part of a selected pronunciation. Lastly, the desired pronunciation can be tested at any point through the use of a text-to-speech synthesizer that generates audible speech data for the selected phonetic transcription.

System for developing word-pronunciation pairs

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.

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Santa Barbara, CA, United States of America

Rhonda Shaw