Synthesis-based pre-selection of suitable units for concatenative speech
View Patent ↗A system and computer-readable medium synthesize speech from text using a triphone unit selection database. The instructions on the computer-readable medium control a computing device to perform the steps: receiving input text, selecting a plurality of N phoneme units from the triphone unit selection database as candidate phonemes for synthesized speech based on the input text, applying a cost process to select a set of phonemes from the candidate phonemes and synthesizing speech using the selected set of phonemes.
1. A system for synthesizing speech from text using a triphone unit selection database, the system comprising:
a module configured to receive input text;
a module configured to select a plurality of N phoneme units from the triphone unit selection database as candidate phonemes for synthesized speech based on the input text;
a module configured to apply a cost process to select a set of phonemes from the candidate phonemes; and
a module configured to synthesize speech using the selected set of phonemes.
2. The system of claim 1 , wherein a Viterbi search is applied as the cost process.
3. The system of claim 1 , further comprising:
a module configured to parse the received input text into recognizable units.
4. The system of claim 3 , wherein the module configured to parse the received input text further:
applies a text normalization process to parse the received text into known words and convert abbreviations into known words; and
applies a syntactic process to perform a grammatical analysis of the known words and identify their associated part of speech.
5. A system for synthesizing speech from text using a triphone unit selection database, the system comprising:
means for receiving input text;
means for selecting a plurality of N phoneme units from the triphone unit selection database as candidate phonemes for synthesized speech based on the input text;
means for applying a cost process to select a set of phonemes from the candidate phonemes; and
means for synthesizing speech using the selected set of phonemes.
6. The system of claim 5 , wherein a Viterbi search is applied as the cost process.
7. The system of claim 5 , further comprising:
means for parsing the received input text into recognizable units.
8. The system of claim 7 , wherein the means for parsing the received input text further:
applies a text normalization process to parse the received text into known words and convert abbreviations into known words; and
applies a syntactic process to perform a grammatical analysis of the known words and identify their associated part of speech.
9. A computer-readable medium storing instructions for controlling a computing device to synthesize speech from text using a triphone unit selection database, the instructions comprising:
receiving input text;
selecting a plurality of N phoneme units from the triphone unit selection database as candidate phonemes for synthesized speech based on the input text;
applying a cost process to select a set of phonemes from the candidate phonemes; and
synthesizing speech using the selected set of phonemes.
10. The computer-readable medium of claim 9 , wherein a Viterbi search is applied as the cost process.
11. The computer-readable medium of claim 9 , wherein subsequent to the step of receiving the input text the following step is performed:
parsing the received text into recognizable units.
12. The computer-readable medium of claim 11 , wherein the parsing further comprises the steps:
applying a text normalization process to parse the received text into known words and convert abbreviations into known words; and
applying a syntactic process to perform a grammatical analysis of the known words and identify their associated part of speech.