Patent ID: 7478039

Claim:
Apparatus comprising: a database that contains a collection of information relative to speech units; a concatenator responsive to information provided by said database for smoothly concatenating the provided information to thereby develop synthesized speech; a signal modifier responsive to said synthesized speech for modifying pitch, duration and energy of the speech units contained in the synthesized speech; a controller adapted to receive a stream of desired speech units, cause said database to provide to the concatenator selected database signals from said collection of information, which signals pertain to speech units that most closely approximate the desired speech units, and cause the signal modifier to modify the pitches of the speech units in the synthesized speech to correspond to the pitches of the desired speech units, to thereby form a pitch-modified synthesized speech; and a spectrum magnitude processor responsive to information provided by said signal modifier for developing spectral envelope parameters of the pitch-modified synthesized speech based on the pitches of the desired speech units, class labels associated with the respective speech units provided by said database, and statistical information that correlates spectral envelope parameters to pitch frequencies and speech class.