Patent ID: 7472066

Claim:
An automatic speech segmentation and verification method for segmenting into speech unit segments and verifying said speech unit segments by determining which phonetic units defined by a known text script are to be accepted for output, said phonetic units accepted for output being used for speech synthesis, comprising: a retrieving step, for retrieving the recorded speech corpus, the recorded speech corpus corresponding to the known text script, the known text script defining phonetic information with N said phonetic units; a segmenting step, for segmenting the recorded speech corpus into N test speech unit segments referring to the phonetic information of the N phonetic units in the known text script; a segment-confidence-measure verifying step, for verifying segment confidence measures of all N cutting points of the N test speech unit segments to determine if the cutting points of the N test speech unit segments are correct; a phonetic-confidence-measure verifying step, for verifying phonetic confidence measures of the test speech unit segments to determine if the test speech unit segments correspond to the known text script; and a determining step, for determining acceptance of the phonetic unit by comparing a combination of the segment confidence measures and the phonetic confidence measures of the test speech unit segments to a predetermined threshold value; wherein if the combined confidence measure is greater than the predetermined threshold value, the phonetic unit is accepted for output.