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. 14, 2004
Filed:
Mar. 30, 2001
Nicholas Kibre, Mountain View, CA (US);
Steven Pearson, Santa Barbara, CA (US);
Brian Hanson, Goleta, CA (US);
Jean-Claude Junqua, Santa Barbara, CA (US);
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Osaka, JP;
Abstract
A new speaker provides speech from which comparison snippets are extracted. The comparison snippets are compared with initial snippets stored in a recorded snippet database that is associated with a concatenative synthesizer. The comparison of the snippets to the initial snippets produces required sound units. A greedy selection algorithm is performed with the required sound units for identifying the smallest subset of the input text that contains all of the text for the new speaker to read. The new speaker then reads the optimally selected text and sound units are extracted from the human speech such that the recorded snippet database is modified and the speech synthesized adopts the voice quality and characteristics of the new speaker.