The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 10, 1996
Filed:
Apr. 07, 1995
Willis J Luther, Irvine, CA (US);
Canon Information Systems, Inc., Costa Mesa, CA (US);
Abstract
A text parser for a text-to-speech processor accepts a text stream and parses the text stream to detect non-spoken characters and spoken characters. The spoken characters are passed to the text-to-speech converter and are not altered. A text generator generates pre-designated text sequences in response to non-spoken characters, such as special character sequences or character sequences which match format templates. A speech command generator generates speech commands in response to detecting of non-spoken characters such as non-spoken characters which affect text style, font, underlining, etc. The text-to-speech converter converts spoken text parsed by the parser and text generated by the text generator into speech, the text-to-speech converter being operable in response to speech commands generated by the speech command generator. According to the invention, it is not necessary to pre-process text files in preparation for text-to-speech conversion, and arbitrary files which contain both spoken and non-spoken characters may be converted easily.