Patent ID: 8521532

Claim:
A speech-conversion processing apparatus, comprising: a character-string structure analyzer operable to analyze a character-string structure within address data selected for speech conversion in accordance with speech-conversion rule data to identify specific elements of an address, where the specific elements of the address of the character-string structure comprises a street name; a general purpose dictionary in which text data of common words are stored in association with corresponding pronunciation symbols; an individually-created general dictionary in which data associated with pronunciation symbols not stored in the general purpose dictionary is stored; a pronunciation-symbol dictionary in which speech-conversion pronunciation symbols are specifically associated with character strings of a specific element of the address of the character-string structure, wherein the pronunciation-symbol dictionary comprises speech-conversion symbols specifically associated with character strings of street names; a data reader operable to search the pronunciation-symbol dictionary, the individually-created general dictionary, and the general purpose dictionary, according to a predetermined scheme, for a character string of the specific element of the address, the character string being obtained by dividing the address data into the specific elements of the address based on a result of the analysis performed by the character-string structure analyzer, and to read data associated with the speech-conversion pronunciation symbols; a speech data creator operable to create speech data for all the elements of address character strings in accordance with the data associated with the speech-conversion pronunciation symbols; and a speech generation section operable to generate speech from the speech data created by the speech data creator; wherein in the predetermined scheme the pronunciation-symbol dictionary is searched first.