Data processing: speech signal processing – linguistics – language – Speech signal processing – Synthesis
Reexamination Certificate
2006-07-25
2006-07-25
Lerner, Martin (Department: 2654)
Data processing: speech signal processing, linguistics, language
Speech signal processing
Synthesis
C704S266000
Reexamination Certificate
active
07082396
ABSTRACT:
A speech synthesis system can select recorded speech fragments, or acoustic units, from a very large database of acoustic units to produce artificial speech. The selected acoustic units are chosen to minimize a combination of target and concatenation costs for a given sentence. However, as concatenation costs, which are measures of the mismatch between sequential pairs of acoustic units, are expensive to compute, processing can be greatly reduced by pre-computing and caching the concatenation costs. Unfortunately, the number of possible sequential pairs of acoustic units makes such caching prohibitive. However, statistical experiments reveal that while about 85% of the acoustic units are typically used in common speech, less than 1% of the possible sequential pairs of acoustic units occur in practice. A method for constructing an efficient concatenation cost database is provided by synthesizing a large body of speech, identifying the acoustic unit sequential pairs generated and their respective concatenation costs, and storing those concatenation costs likely to occur. By constructing a concatenation cost database in this fashion, the processing power required at run-time is greatly reduced with negligible effect on speech quality.
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Beutnagel Mark C.
Mohri Mehryar
Riley Michael D.
AT&T Corp
Lerner Martin
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