Patent ID: 6810379
Filing Date: 2004-10-26
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
In a computer system comprising a server machine and a client machine, a text-to-speech synthesis method comprising:describing a finite number of possible acoustic units; optimizing a compression method selected in dependence of said finite number of possible acoustic units, wherein said optimizing step further comprises selecting parameters of said compression method utilizing a directed optimized search to minimize the amount of data transmitted between said server machine and said client machine; compressing said finite number of possible acoustic units via said optimized compression method; storing said finite number of possible acoustic units as compressed acoustic units in an acoustic unit database accessible to said server machine; in said server machine, obtaining a normalized text and generating prosody data thereof; selecting from said acoustic unit database compressed acoustic units that correspond to said normalized text; transmitting said prosody data and said selected compressed acoustic units from said server machine to said client machine; and in said client machine, decompressing said transmitted acoustic units and concatenating said decompressed acoustic units in accordance with said prosody data.