Patent ID: 8768701

Claim:
A method for speech synthesis, said method implemented on a handheld device and comprising: receiving a spoken word; in response to receiving the spoken word: extracting one or more prosodic parameters from the spoken word; performing speech recognition on the spoken word to generate a recognized word; from the recognized word that is generated from the speech recognition, synthesizing a nominal word comprising nominal frames from default synthesis rules; temporally aligning end points of the recognized word with the spoken word by forcing end points of the synthesized nominal word to correspond to the spoken word; applying the one or more prosodic parameters to the nominal word; adding frames to or removing frames from the nominal frames to adjust timing of the nominal word to match the length of the spoken word; generating a prosodic mimic word based on the applied prosodic parameters and the time adjustment performed on the nominal word; and playing back the generated prosodic mimic word on the handheld device.