Patent ID: 7412390

Claim:
A speech synthesis method for receiving information on an emotion to synthesize the speech, comprising: a prosodic data forming step of forming prosodic data from a string of pronunciation marks which is based on an uttered text, uttered as speech; a constraint information generating step of generating constraint information used for maintaining a selected prosodic feature of the uttered text, said selected prosodic feature of a particular phoneme is chosen to maintain the meaning and contents of a word contained in the uttered text; a parameter changing step of changing parameters of said prosodic data, in consideration of said constraint information, responsive to the information on the emotion; and a speech synthesis step of synthesizing the speech based on said prosodic data the parameters of which have been changed in said parameter changing step, wherein, in the parameter changing step, the information on emotion cannot change the prosodic data of the selected prosodic feature.