EP1777697A3 - Method and apparatus for speech synthesis without prosody modification - Google Patents

Method and apparatus for speech synthesis without prosody modification Download PDF

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Publication number
EP1777697A3
EP1777697A3 EP07002565A EP07002565A EP1777697A3 EP 1777697 A3 EP1777697 A3 EP 1777697A3 EP 07002565 A EP07002565 A EP 07002565A EP 07002565 A EP07002565 A EP 07002565A EP 1777697 A3 EP1777697 A3 EP 1777697A3
Authority
EP
European Patent Office
Prior art keywords
speech
samples
present
produce
prosodic
Prior art date
Legal status (The legal status 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 status listed.)
Granted
Application number
EP07002565A
Other languages
German (de)
French (fr)
Other versions
EP1777697B1 (en
EP1777697A2 (en
Inventor
Min Chu
Hu Peng
Current Assignee (The listed assignees may be inaccurate. Google has not performed a legal analysis and makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy of the list.)
Microsoft Corp
Original Assignee
Microsoft Corp
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 US09/850,527 external-priority patent/US6978239B2/en
Application filed by Microsoft Corp filed Critical Microsoft Corp
Publication of EP1777697A2 publication Critical patent/EP1777697A2/en
Publication of EP1777697A3 publication Critical patent/EP1777697A3/en
Application granted granted Critical
Publication of EP1777697B1 publication Critical patent/EP1777697B1/en
Anticipated expiration legal-status Critical
Expired - Lifetime legal-status Critical Current

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Classifications

    • G—PHYSICS
    • G10—MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS; ACOUSTICS
    • G10L—SPEECH ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES OR SPEECH SYNTHESIS; SPEECH RECOGNITION; SPEECH OR VOICE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES; SPEECH OR AUDIO CODING OR DECODING
    • G10L13/00—Speech synthesis; Text to speech systems
    • G10L13/06—Elementary speech units used in speech synthesisers; Concatenation rules
    • G10L13/07—Concatenation rules
    • G—PHYSICS
    • G10—MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS; ACOUSTICS
    • G10L—SPEECH ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES OR SPEECH SYNTHESIS; SPEECH RECOGNITION; SPEECH OR VOICE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES; 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

Landscapes

  • Engineering & Computer Science (AREA)
  • Computational Linguistics (AREA)
  • Health & Medical Sciences (AREA)
  • Audiology, Speech & Language Pathology (AREA)
  • Human Computer Interaction (AREA)
  • Physics & Mathematics (AREA)
  • Acoustics & Sound (AREA)
  • Multimedia (AREA)
  • Machine Translation (AREA)
  • Document Processing Apparatus (AREA)

Abstract

A speech synthesizer is provided that concatenates stored samples of speech units without modifying the prosody of the samples. The present invention is able to achieve a high level of naturalness in synthesized speech with a carefully designed training speech corpus by storing samples based on the prosodic and phonetic context in which they occur. In particular, some embodiments of the present invention limit the training text to those sentences that will produce the most frequent sets of prosodic contexts for each speech unit. Further embodiments of the present invention also provide a multi-tier selection mechanism for selecting a set of samples that will produce the most natural sounding speech.
EP07002565A 2000-12-04 2001-12-03 Method for speech synthesis without prosody modification Expired - Lifetime EP1777697B1 (en)

Applications Claiming Priority (3)

Application Number Priority Date Filing Date Title
US25116700P 2000-12-04 2000-12-04
US09/850,527 US6978239B2 (en) 2000-12-04 2001-05-07 Method and apparatus for speech synthesis without prosody modification
EP01128765A EP1213705B1 (en) 2000-12-04 2001-12-03 Method and apparatus for speech synthesis

Related Parent Applications (2)

Application Number Title Priority Date Filing Date
EP01128765A Division EP1213705B1 (en) 2000-12-04 2001-12-03 Method and apparatus for speech synthesis
EP01128765.3 Division 2001-12-03

Publications (3)

Publication Number Publication Date
EP1777697A2 EP1777697A2 (en) 2007-04-25
EP1777697A3 true EP1777697A3 (en) 2008-06-18
EP1777697B1 EP1777697B1 (en) 2013-03-20

Family

ID=37831625

Family Applications (1)

Application Number Title Priority Date Filing Date
EP07002565A Expired - Lifetime EP1777697B1 (en) 2000-12-04 2001-12-03 Method for speech synthesis without prosody modification

Country Status (1)

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EP (1) EP1777697B1 (en)

Families Citing this family (3)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
GB2559767A (en) * 2017-02-17 2018-08-22 Pastel Dreams Method and system for personalised voice synthesis
GB2559766A (en) * 2017-02-17 2018-08-22 Pastel Dreams Method and system for defining text content for speech segmentation
EP3895157A4 (en) * 2018-12-13 2022-07-27 Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC Neural text-to-speech synthesis with multi-level text information

Citations (2)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
EP0984426A2 (en) * 1998-08-31 2000-03-08 Canon Kabushiki Kaisha Speech synthesizing apparatus and method, and storage medium therefor
US6064960A (en) * 1997-12-18 2000-05-16 Apple Computer, Inc. Method and apparatus for improved duration modeling of phonemes

Patent Citations (2)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
US6064960A (en) * 1997-12-18 2000-05-16 Apple Computer, Inc. Method and apparatus for improved duration modeling of phonemes
EP0984426A2 (en) * 1998-08-31 2000-03-08 Canon Kabushiki Kaisha Speech synthesizing apparatus and method, and storage medium therefor

Non-Patent Citations (7)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Title
BIGORGNE D ET AL: "Multilingual PSOLA text-to-speech system", STATISTICAL SIGNAL AND ARRAY PROCESSING. MINNEAPOLIS, APR. 27 - 30, 1993, PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING (ICASSP), NEW YORK, IEEE, US, vol. VOL. 4, 27 April 1993 (1993-04-27), pages 187 - 190, XP010110425, ISBN: 0-7803-0946-4 *
BLACK A W ET AL: "OPTIMISING SELECTION OF UNITS FROM SPEECH DATABASES FOR CONCATENATIVE SYNTHESIS", 4TH EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON SPEECH COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY. EUROSPEECH '95. MADRID, SPAIN, SEPT. 18 - 21, 1995, EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON SPEECH COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY. (EUROSPEECH), MADRID : GRAFICAS BRENS, ES, vol. VOL. 1 CONF. 4, 18 September 1995 (1995-09-18), pages 581 - 584, XP000854776 *
FU-CHIANG CHOU ET AL: "A Chinese text-to-speech system based on part-of-speech analysis, prosodic modeling and non-uniform units", ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING, 1997. ICASSP-97., 1997 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MUNICH, GERMANY 21-24 APRIL 1997, LOS ALAMITOS, CA, USA,IEEE COMPUT. SOC, US, 21 April 1997 (1997-04-21), pages 923 - 926, XP010225946, ISBN: 0-8186-7919-0 *
HUANG X ET AL: "Recent improvements on Microsoft's trainable text-to-speech system-Whistler", ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING, 1997. ICASSP-97., 1997 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MUNICH, GERMANY 21-24 APRIL 1997, LOS ALAMITOS, CA, USA,IEEE COMPUT. SOC, US, 21 April 1997 (1997-04-21), pages 959 - 962, XP010225955, ISBN: 0-8186-7919-0 *
HUNT A J ET AL: "Unit selection in a concatenative speech synthesis system using a large speech database", 1996 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING - PROCEEDINGS. (ICASSP). ATLANTA, MAY 7 - 10, 1996, IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING - PROCEEDINGS. (ICASSP), NEW YORK, IEEE, US, vol. VOL. 1 CONF. 21, 7 May 1996 (1996-05-07), pages 373 - 376, XP002133444, ISBN: 0-7803-3193-1 *
NAKAJIMA S ET AL: "Automatic generation of synthesis units based on context oriented clustering", ICASSP 88: 1988 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND ICASSP 88: 1988 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING (CAT. NO.88CH2561-9) - 11-14 APRIL 1988, 11 April 1988 (1988-04-11), NEW YORK, USA, pages 659 - 662, XP010073228 *
TIEN YING FUNG ET AL: "Concatenating syllables for response generation in spoken language applications", IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH, AND SIGNAL PROCESSING, 2000; PROCEEDINGS, vol. 2, 5 June 2000 (2000-06-05), Istanbul, Turkey, 5-9 June 2000, pages 933 - 936, XP010504877 *

Also Published As

Publication number Publication date
EP1777697B1 (en) 2013-03-20
EP1777697A2 (en) 2007-04-25

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