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:
Mar. 25, 2014
Filed:
Jul. 07, 2011
Slava Shechtman, Haifa, IL;
Alexander Sorin, Haifa, IL;
Slava Shechtman, Haifa, IL;
Alexander Sorin, Haifa, IL;
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A method, system and computer program product are provided for enhancement of speech synthesized by a statistical text-to-speech (TTS) system employing a parametric representation of speech in a space of acoustic feature vectors. The method includes: defining a parametric family of corrective transformations operating in the space of the acoustic feature vectors and dependent on a set of enhancing parameters; and defining a distortion indictor of a feature vector or a plurality of feature vectors. The method further includes: receiving a feature vector output by the system; and generating an instance of the corrective transformation by: calculating a reference value of the distortion indicator attributed to a statistical model of the phonetic unit emitting the feature vector; calculating an actual value of the distortion indicator attributed to feature vectors emitted by the statistical model of the phonetic unit emitting the feature vector; calculating the enhancing parameter values depending on the reference value of the distortion indicator, the actual value of the distortion indicator and the parametric corrective transformation; and deriving an instance of the corrective transformation corresponding to the enhancing parameter values from the parametric family of the corrective transformations. The instance of the corrective transformation may be applied to the feature vector to provide an enhanced feature vector.