Patent ID: 6961704
Filing Date: 2005-11-01
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
1. A method, comprising: generating at least one linguistic prosodic model, each of the at least one linguistic prosodic model characterizing a corresponding linguistic prosody and being used to facilitate unit selection during text to speech processing, wherein the at least one linguistic prosodic model is generated from the recorded speech of a target speaker; receiving an input text for text to speech processing; generating, according to the input text, a target unit sequence and a linguistic target which annotates the target units in the target unit sequence with a plurality of linguistic prosodic characteristics so that the speech synthesized in accordance with the target unit sequence and the linguistic target has certain desired prosodic properties; and producing synthesized speech using a selected unit sequence determined in accordance with the target unit sequence and the linguistic target based on an estimated joint cost; wherein estimating the joint cost comprises computing a linguistic prosody cost based on the at least one linguistic prosodic model; computing a context cost based on at least one context cost function; computing a mismatch cost based on a syllable position mismatch matrix with elements defining costs associated with different types of syllable position mismatch, a phrase position mismatch matrix with elements defining costs associated with different types of phrase position mismatch, and a stress/pitch accent mismatch matrix with elements defining costs associated with different types of stress/pitch accent mismatch; computing a concatenation cost; and combining the linguistic prosody cost, the context cost, the mismatch cost, and the concatenation cost to generate the joint cost.