WO2000055842A3 - Speech synthesis - Google Patents

Speech synthesis

Info

Publication number
WO2000055842A3
WO2000055842A3 PCT/GB2000/000854 GB0000854W WO0055842A3 WO 2000055842 A3 WO2000055842 A3 WO 2000055842A3 GB 0000854 W GB0000854 W GB 0000854W WO 0055842 A3 WO0055842 A3 WO 0055842A3
Authority
WO
WIPO (PCT)
Prior art keywords
phrase boundaries
text
syntactic
chunks
boundaries
Prior art date
Application number
PCT/GB2000/000854
Other languages
French (fr)
Other versions
WO2000055842A2 (en
Inventor
Stephen Minnis
Original Assignee
British Telecomm
Stephen Minnis
Priority date (The priority date is an assumption and is not a legal conclusion. Google has not performed a legal analysis and makes no representation as to the accuracy of the date listed.)
Filing date
Publication date
Priority claimed from GBGB9905904.0A external-priority patent/GB9905904D0/en
Application filed by British Telecomm, Stephen Minnis filed Critical British Telecomm
Priority to US09/913,462 priority Critical patent/US6996529B1/en
Priority to AU29316/00A priority patent/AU2931600A/en
Priority to CA002366952A priority patent/CA2366952A1/en
Priority to EP00907852A priority patent/EP1163663A2/en
Publication of WO2000055842A2 publication Critical patent/WO2000055842A2/en
Publication of WO2000055842A3 publication Critical patent/WO2000055842A3/en

Links

Classifications

    • G—PHYSICS
    • G10—MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS; ACOUSTICS
    • G10L—SPEECH ANALYSIS OR SYNTHESIS; SPEECH RECOGNITION; SPEECH OR VOICE PROCESSING; SPEECH OR AUDIO CODING OR DECODING
    • G10L13/00—Speech synthesis; Text to speech systems
    • G10L13/08—Text analysis or generation of parameters for speech synthesis out of text, e.g. grapheme to phoneme translation, prosody generation or stress or intonation determination
    • G10L13/10—Prosody rules derived from text; Stress or intonation
    • G—PHYSICS
    • G10—MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS; ACOUSTICS
    • G10L—SPEECH ANALYSIS OR SYNTHESIS; SPEECH RECOGNITION; SPEECH OR VOICE PROCESSING; SPEECH OR AUDIO CODING OR DECODING
    • G10L13/00—Speech synthesis; Text to speech systems
    • G10L13/02—Methods for producing synthetic speech; Speech synthesisers
    • G10L13/04—Details of speech synthesis systems, e.g. synthesiser structure or memory management

Abstract

Conventional methods of predicting phrase boundaries occasionally result in the output of text-to-speech conversion apparatus sounding unnatural. Text-to-speech conversion apparatus described herein uses pattern-matching to predict the position of phrase boundaries in its spoken output. The apparatus analyses text input to the apparatus to identify groups of words (known as 'chunks') which are unlikely to contain internal phrase boundaries. Both the chunks and individual words are labelled with their syntactic characteristics. The apparatus has access to a database of sentences which also contains such syntactic labels, together with indications of where a human reader would insert minor and major phrase boundaries. The parts of the database which have the most similar syntactic characteristics are found and phrase boundaries are predicted based on the phrase boundaries found in those parts. Other characteristics are also used in the pattern-matching process.
PCT/GB2000/000854 1999-03-15 2000-03-08 Speech synthesis WO2000055842A2 (en)

Priority Applications (4)

Application Number Priority Date Filing Date Title
US09/913,462 US6996529B1 (en) 1999-03-15 2000-03-08 Speech synthesis with prosodic phrase boundary information
AU29316/00A AU2931600A (en) 1999-03-15 2000-03-08 Speech synthesis
CA002366952A CA2366952A1 (en) 1999-03-15 2000-03-08 Speech synthesis
EP00907852A EP1163663A2 (en) 1999-03-15 2000-03-08 Speech synthesis

Applications Claiming Priority (4)

Application Number Priority Date Filing Date Title
GB9905904.0 1999-03-15
GBGB9905904.0A GB9905904D0 (en) 1999-03-15 1999-03-15 Speech synthesis
EP99305349 1999-07-06
EP99305349.5 1999-07-06

Publications (2)

Publication Number Publication Date
WO2000055842A2 WO2000055842A2 (en) 2000-09-21
WO2000055842A3 true WO2000055842A3 (en) 2000-12-21

Family

ID=26153528

Family Applications (1)

Application Number Title Priority Date Filing Date
PCT/GB2000/000854 WO2000055842A2 (en) 1999-03-15 2000-03-08 Speech synthesis

Country Status (5)

Country Link
US (1) US6996529B1 (en)
EP (1) EP1163663A2 (en)
AU (1) AU2931600A (en)
CA (1) CA2366952A1 (en)
WO (1) WO2000055842A2 (en)

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US7725307B2 (en) * 1999-11-12 2010-05-25 Phoenix Solutions, Inc. Query engine for processing voice based queries including semantic decoding
US7392185B2 (en) * 1999-11-12 2008-06-24 Phoenix Solutions, Inc. Speech based learning/training system using semantic decoding
US7050977B1 (en) 1999-11-12 2006-05-23 Phoenix Solutions, Inc. Speech-enabled server for internet website and method
US9076448B2 (en) * 1999-11-12 2015-07-07 Nuance Communications, Inc. Distributed real time speech recognition system
KR100463655B1 (en) * 2002-11-15 2004-12-29 삼성전자주식회사 Text-to-speech conversion apparatus and method having function of offering additional information
US7328157B1 (en) * 2003-01-24 2008-02-05 Microsoft Corporation Domain adaptation for TTS systems
JP4407305B2 (en) * 2003-02-17 2010-02-03 株式会社ケンウッド Pitch waveform signal dividing device, speech signal compression device, speech synthesis device, pitch waveform signal division method, speech signal compression method, speech synthesis method, recording medium, and program
CN1604077B (en) * 2003-09-29 2012-08-08 纽昂斯通讯公司 Improvement for pronunciation waveform corpus
US7937263B2 (en) * 2004-12-01 2011-05-03 Dictaphone Corporation System and method for tokenization of text using classifier models
CN101202041B (en) * 2006-12-13 2011-01-05 富士通株式会社 Method and device for making words using Chinese rhythm words
US8583438B2 (en) * 2007-09-20 2013-11-12 Microsoft Corporation Unnatural prosody detection in speech synthesis
US10957310B1 (en) 2012-07-23 2021-03-23 Soundhound, Inc. Integrated programming framework for speech and text understanding with meaning parsing
US11295730B1 (en) 2014-02-27 2022-04-05 Soundhound, Inc. Using phonetic variants in a local context to improve natural language understanding
RU2639684C2 (en) * 2014-08-29 2017-12-21 Общество С Ограниченной Ответственностью "Яндекс" Text processing method (versions) and constant machine-readable medium (versions)
US10095686B2 (en) * 2015-04-06 2018-10-09 Adobe Systems Incorporated Trending topic extraction from social media
US11210470B2 (en) * 2019-03-28 2021-12-28 Adobe Inc. Automatic text segmentation based on relevant context
CN112071300B (en) * 2020-11-12 2021-04-06 深圳追一科技有限公司 Voice conversation method, device, computer equipment and storage medium

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US5463713A (en) * 1991-05-07 1995-10-31 Kabushiki Kaisha Meidensha Synthesis of speech from text
EP0821344A2 (en) * 1996-07-25 1998-01-28 Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. Method and apparatus for synthesizing speech
EP0833304A2 (en) * 1996-09-30 1998-04-01 Microsoft Corporation Prosodic databases holding fundamental frequency templates for use in speech synthesis
US5832435A (en) * 1993-03-19 1998-11-03 Nynex Science & Technology Inc. Methods for controlling the generation of speech from text representing one or more names

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EP0680653B1 (en) * 1993-10-15 2001-06-20 AT&T Corp. A method for training a tts system, the resulting apparatus, and method of use thereof
US5913193A (en) * 1996-04-30 1999-06-15 Microsoft Corporation Method and system of runtime acoustic unit selection for speech synthesis
US5950162A (en) * 1996-10-30 1999-09-07 Motorola, Inc. Method, device and system for generating segment durations in a text-to-speech system
JP3587048B2 (en) * 1998-03-02 2004-11-10 株式会社日立製作所 Prosody control method and speech synthesizer
DE69940747D1 (en) * 1998-11-13 2009-05-28 Lernout & Hauspie Speechprod Speech synthesis by linking speech waveforms
GB2376394B (en) * 2001-06-04 2005-10-26 Hewlett Packard Co Speech synthesis apparatus and selection method

Patent Citations (4)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
US5463713A (en) * 1991-05-07 1995-10-31 Kabushiki Kaisha Meidensha Synthesis of speech from text
US5832435A (en) * 1993-03-19 1998-11-03 Nynex Science & Technology Inc. Methods for controlling the generation of speech from text representing one or more names
EP0821344A2 (en) * 1996-07-25 1998-01-28 Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. Method and apparatus for synthesizing speech
EP0833304A2 (en) * 1996-09-30 1998-04-01 Microsoft Corporation Prosodic databases holding fundamental frequency templates for use in speech synthesis

Non-Patent Citations (3)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Title
KIM ET AL.: "Prediction of prosodic phrase boundaries considering variable speaking rate", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SPOKEN LANGUAGE PROCESSING (ICSLP '96), 3 October 1996 (1996-10-03) - 6 October 1906 (1906-10-06), PHILADELPHIA, PA, US, pages 1505 - 1508 vol.3, XP002124437, ISBN: 0-7803-3555-4 *
WANG ET AL.: "Predicting intonational boundaries automatically from text: the ATIS domain", PROCEEDINGS OF THE DARPA SPEECH AND NATURAL LANGUAGE WORKSHOP, February 1991 (1991-02-01), pages 378 - 383, XP000856817 *
ZHU ET AL.: "Learning mappings between Chinese isolated syllables and syllables in phrase with back propagation neural nets", PROCEEDINGS OF THE 1998 ARTIFICIAL NETWORKS IN ENGINEERING CONFERENCE, vol. 8, 1 November 1998 (1998-11-01) - 4 November 1998 (1998-11-04), ST.LOUIS, MO, US, pages 723 - 727, XP000856953 *

Also Published As

Publication number Publication date
EP1163663A2 (en) 2001-12-19
AU2931600A (en) 2000-10-04
CA2366952A1 (en) 2000-09-21
WO2000055842A2 (en) 2000-09-21
US6996529B1 (en) 2006-02-07

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