Patent ID: 7031914

Claim:
A method of concatenating a plurality of electronic voice data segments, the plurality of segments being encoded according to a source modeled algorithm, the algorithm including at least one excitation function, wherein each data segment includes information relating to an excitation function and wherein at least one excitation function is usable within a Code Excited Linear Prediction system to synthesize voice, the method comprising: evaluating the plurality of electronic voice data segments; assembling the data segments into a sequence, thereby forming at least one concatenation point; developing a content-based prediction of the language represented by the sequence; extracting said at least one excitation function from the sequence; and modifying the excitation function at the concatenation point for at least one of the data segments based in part of the evaluation and the prediction to thereby produce a voice inflection representative of the language represented by the sequence; wherein the sequence represents a question and one of the excitation functions is related to pitch data, the method, further comprising adjusting the pitch excitation data, thereby causing the data sequence to more accurately represent a voiced question.