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:
Aug. 17, 2010
Filed:
Dec. 04, 2007
Jerome R. Bellegarda, Los Gatos, CA (US);
Kim E. A. Silverman, Mountain View, CA (US);
Jerome R. Bellegarda, Los Gatos, CA (US);
Kim E. A. Silverman, Mountain View, CA (US);
Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA (US);
Abstract
A method and apparatus is provided for generating speech that sounds more natural. Determining whether information in a current sentence is new or previously given is performed based on a semantic relationship between the current sentence and a number of preceding sentences. A word prominence for the synthetic speech to a word in the current sentence is assigned in accordance with the information determination. A speech representative of the current sentence can be generated. In one embodiment, word prominence and latent semantic analysis are used to generate more natural sounding speech. A method for generating speech that sounds more natural may comprise generating synthesized speech having certain word prominence characteristics and applying a semantically-driven word prominence assignment model to specify word prominence consistent with the way humans assign word prominence.