Patent Document ID: 9093067
Application ID: 13685228

Base Claim:
1. A method implemented by a system of one or more computers, comprising: receiving, by the system of one or more computers, speech utterances encoded in audio data and a transcript having text that represents the speech utterances; extracting, by the system of one or more computers, prosodic contours from the utterances; extracting, by the system of one or more computers and from the transcript, attributes of text associated with the utterances; for pairs of utterances from the speech utterances, determining, by the system of one or more computers, distances between attributes of text associated with the pairs of utterances; for the pairs of utterances from the speech utterances, determining, by the system of one or more computers, distances between prosodic contours for the pairs of utterances; generating, by the system of one or more computers, a model based on the determined distances for the attributes and the prosodic contours, the model adapted to estimate a distance between a determined prosodic contour for a received utterance and a prosodic contour for a synthesized utterance when given a distance between an attribute of text associated with the received utterance and an attribute of text associated with the synthesized utterance; and storing, by the system of one or more computers, the model in a computer-readable memory device.

---

Claim 7:
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein generating the model comprises mapping the distances between the attributes of text associated with the pairs of utterances to the distances between the prosodic contours for the pairs of utterances in order to determine a relationship between the distances associated with the attributes of the text and the distances associated with the prosodic contours for pairs of utterances.