Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba

Yoshinori Shiga

Takehiko Kagoshima

Masahiro Morita

Masami Akamine

Shigenobu Seto

Takaaki Nii

A text analysis section reads, from a text file, a text to be subjected to speech synthesis, and analyzes the text using a morphological analysis section, a syntactic structure analysis section, a semantic analysis section and a similarly-pronounced-word detecting section. A speech segment selecting section incorporated in a speech synthesizing section obtains the degree of intelligibility of synthetic speech for each accent phrase on the basis of the text analysis result of the text analysis section, thereby selecting a speech segment string corresponding to each accent phrase on the basis of the degree of intelligibility from one of a 0th-rank speech segment dictionary, a first-rank speech segment dictionary and a second-rank speech segment dictionary. A speech segment connecting section connects selected speech segment strings and subjects the connection result to speech synthesis performed by a synthesizing filter section.

Speech synthesizing apparatus, and recording medium that stores text-to-speech conversion program and can be read mechanically

A representative pattern memory stores a plurality of initial representative patterns as a noise pattern. Different attribute is affixed to each initial representative pattern. A pitch pattern memory stores a large number of natural pitch patterns as an accent phrase. A clustering unit classifies each natural pitch pattern to the initial representative pattern based on the attribute of the accent phrase. A transformation parameter generation unit calculates an error between a transformed representative pattern and each natural pitch pattern classified to the initial representative pattern. A representative pattern generation unit calculates an evaluation function of the sum of the error between the transformed-representative pattern and each natural pitch pattern classified to the initial representative pattern, and updates each initial representative pattern. The representative pattern memory stores each updated representative pattern as a clustered pattern of the attribute affixed to the corresponding initial representative pattern.

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Yokohama, Japan

Yoshinori Shiga