Patent ID: 8185395

Claim:
An information transmission device which analyzes a diction of a speaker of a plurality of speakers and provides an utterance in accordance with the diction of the speaker, the information transmission device comprising: a microphone detecting a sound signal of the speaker of the plurality of speakers; a feature extraction unit extracting at least one feature value of the diction of the speaker based on the sound signal detected by the microphone; a first emotional database for storing a plurality of correlation data of the speaker, the correlation data correlating at least one feature quantity, a type of emotion, and a phoneme or a phoneme sequence based on the detected sound signal of the speaker; a second emotional database for storing a plurality of correlation data of the plurality of the speakers, the correlation data being generated by averaging the feature quantities computed from the diction of the plurality of the speakers; an emotion estimation part: computing at least one feature quantity from the feature value based on the detected sound signal of the speaker; responsive to the feature quantity being found in the first emotional database: calculating a distance between at least one computed feature quantity and at least one corresponding feature quantity stored in the first emotional database; estimating the emotion of the speaker based on the calculated distance and the correlation data stored in the first emotional database; and generating a corresponding emotion indication; responsive to the feature quantity not being found in the first emotional database; dividing the detected sound signal of the speaker into a plurality of predetermined sections; estimating the emotion of the speaker based on the feature quantities in the second emotional database, the feature quantities in the second emotional database being computed from the detected sound signal in the predetermined sections and learning of the first emotional database; and generating a corresponding emotion indication; a voice synthesis unit synthesizing a voice signal to be uttered so that the voice signal has the same feature value as the diction of the speaker, based on the feature value extracted by the feature extraction unit; and a voice output unit performing an utterance based on the voice signal synthesized by the voice synthesis unit.