Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Yun-Chiang Kung

Sheng-Yao Shih

Chiwei Che

Chih-Chung Wang

Hsiang-Fu Liu

Chin-Nan Lee

Yu-Li Huang

Non-limiting examples described herein relate to processing for transcoding textual content into audio signals. In some examples, transcoding services are provided over a distributed network, for example, through an interaction between a client device and a server device. For instance, a client device may transmit a selection of a document to a server device. The server device may access a document source for the document and transcode content from the document source into speech. The server device may transmit the transcoded content to the client device, for example, where the client device may output the transcoded content. For instance, the transcoded content may be an audio file that is streamed by the client device.

Audio output of a document from mobile device

Architecture for playing a document converted into an audio format to a user of an audio-output capable device. The user can interact with the device to control play of the audio document such as pause, rewind, forward, etc. In more robust implementation, the audio-output capable device is a mobile device (e.g., cell phone) having a microphone for processing voice input. Voice commands can then be input to control play ('reading') of the document audio file to pause, rewind, read paragraph, read next chapter, fast forward, etc. A communications server (e.g., email, attachments to email, etc.) transcodes text-based document content into an audio format by leveraging a text-to-speech (TTS) engine. The transcoded audio files are then transferred to mobile devices through viable transmission channels. Users can then play the audio-formatted document while freeing hand and eye usage for other tasks.

Architecture that enables a user to perform manual word-breaking by phrase input. Phrase input is where the user inserts a phrase-key (or separator) as a delimiter that indicates to an editor application such as an IME (input method editor) the composition of a specific phrase when entering characters (e.g., Asian). The word-breaking is controlled by the user. The conversion quality is improved as the user knows the desired input and ambiguous cases are reduced. A phrase can be specified while the user is composing the characters. By selecting a phrase-key separator, the user can specify the composing characters before the characters are presented as a phrase. Moreover, the architecture includes a phrase prioritization mechanism wherein each phrase can be treated as a single entity and assigned a character identifier (ID), which is related to the sequence of a candidate list.

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Yun-Chiang Kung