Importance

Loading Importance Indicators...

Abstract

A system and method for improving the response time of text-to-speech synthesis utilizes 'triphone contexts' (i.e., triplets comprising a central phoneme and its immediate context) as the basic unit, instead of performing phoneme-by-phoneme synthesis. The method comprises a method of generating a triphone preselection cost database for use in speech synthesis, the method comprising 1) selecting a triphone sequence u.sub.1-u.sub.2-u.sub.3, 2) calculating a preselection cost for each 5-phoneme sequence u.sub.a-u.sub.1-u.sub.2-u.sub.3-u.sub.b, where u.sub.2 is allowed to match any identically labeled phoneme in a database and the units u.sub.a and u.sub.b vary over the entire phoneme universe and 3) storing a group of the selected triphone sequences exhibiting the lowest costs in a triphone preselection cost database.

Loading the Abstract Image...

First Claim