Thomas Edward Merritt

Title: Thomas Edward Merritt: Innovator in Text-to-Speech Technology

Introduction

Thomas Edward Merritt is a prominent inventor based in Cambridge, GB. He has made significant contributions to the field of text-to-speech technology, holding a total of 13 patents. His work has advanced the way machines understand and generate human speech, making communication more accessible and efficient.

Latest Patents

Merritt's latest patents include innovations in text-to-speech (TTS) processing. During TTS processing, a speech model creates output audio data that corresponds to input text data, which includes a representation of the speech. A spectrogram estimator estimates a frequency spectrogram of the speech, and the corresponding frequency-spectrogram data is used to condition the speech model. Additionally, a plurality of acoustic features corresponding to different segments of the input text data, such as phonemes, syllable-level features, and word-level features, may be separately encoded into context vectors. The spectrogram estimator utilizes these separate context vectors to create the frequency spectrogram.

Another notable patent focuses on voice customization for synthetic speech generation. This application involves synthesizing speech with specific voice characteristics and modifying the voice characteristics of human speech. Techniques for voice customization may be used in conjunction with compressing speech for storage and transmission. For instance, speech may be received at a first device and transformed into a latent representation for storage or transmission to a second device. The system employs normalizing flows to transform the source audio into a latent representation with a desired variable distribution, and then back into audio data.

Career Highlights

Merritt is currently employed at Amazon Technologies, Inc., where he continues to innovate in the field of speech technology. His work has not only contributed to advancements in TTS but has also paved the way for more personalized and effective communication tools.

Collaborations

Throughout his career, Merritt has collaborated with notable colleagues, including Andrew Paul Breen and Viacheslav Klimkov. These collaborations have further enriched his work and contributed to the development of cutting-edge technologies in speech synthesis.

Conclusion

Thomas Edward Merritt is a key figure in the advancement of text-to-speech technology, with a strong portfolio of patents that reflect his innovative spirit. His contributions continue to shape the future of communication technology, making it more intuitive and accessible for users worldwide.