Electronic news reception apparatus that selectively retains sections

Abstract

An electronic news receiving device receives text data for an electronic edition of a newspaper in the evening and audibly reads the newspaper to the user the next day. The newsreader includes a receiver which receives an electronic edition of a newspaper transmitted by a transmitter at an electronic news preparer's facility. The news preparer may mark words that do not conform to conventional letter-to-sound rules with a pronunciation flag and provide pronunciation data for the words with the electronic edition of the newspaper. The data may be compressed by providing a dictionary in the news receiving device and, at the preparer's facility, translating each word into a dictionary address. The transmission channel may include a telephone line, the vertical blanking interval of a television signal, a cable television channel, an AM/FM subcarrier signal or a satellite channel. The received electronic edition of the newspaper is processed by a section filter to retain desired sections of the newspaper and to discard unwanted sections. The retained news articles are stored in memory. A text-to-speech converter produces an audible output corresponding to the spoken text of the news articles. A user can input one or more keywords to cause the device to selectively read articles containing the keywords. The text to speech converter of the device uses rules and a dictionary to provide syntactic and semantic prosody for morpheme reconstructions. The user may determine which articles are read and may vary the rate at which articles are read using manual controls or spoken commands.