Patent ID: 7315813

Claim:
A method of speech segment selection for use in constructing a concatenative synthesizer's database based on prosody-aligned distance measure, comprising the steps of: (A) segmenting speech stored in a speech corpus, which is recorded in advance into a plurality of speech segments according to a unit type, wherein each of the speech segments has its prosody; (B) locating pitch marks for each of the speech segments; (C) selecting one of the speech segments according to the unit type as a source segment and the remaining speech segments as target segments, and performing a prosody alignment between the source segment and each of the target segments by modifying the prosody of the source segment with a respective prosody of each of the target segments, so as to obtain a prosody-aligned source segment with respect to each of the target segments, wherein the pitch marks of the prosody-aligned source segment are time-aligned and pitch-aligned with the pitch marks of each of the target segments; (D) respectively measuring distortion between the prosody-aligned source segment and each of the target segments to obtain a distance between the prosody-aligned source segment and each of the target segments, and to obtain an average distance for the prosody-aligned source segment with respect to each of the target segments; and (E) selecting at least one speech segment previously selected as the source segment with a relatively small average distance to be used as a synthetic speech unit of the unit type for constructing the synthesizer's database.