Patent ID: 8886538

Claim:
An article of manufacture comprising a program storage device readable by a machine, tangibly embodying a program of instructions executable by the machine to perform a method for speech synthesis that allows user specified pronunciations, the method comprising: providing a user interface that allows a user to identify a text string for synthesis and to speak a pronunciation of the text string; recording the user's spoken pronunciation of the text string as an audio signal; extracting prosodic parameter values from the audio signal corresponding to the user's pronunciation of the text string, wherein extracting the prosodic parameter values comprises extracting duration parameter values from the audio signal by aligning the audio signal with the text string; automatically translating at least a portion of the prosodic parameter values extracted at least in part by aligning the audio signal of the user's spoken pronunciation with the text string into abstract labels to generate a high-level markup of the text string; and generating a synthetic speech waveform by applying a markup-enabled text-to-speech engine to the text string with the high-level markup.