Patent Document ID: 8219398
Application ID: 11909514

Base Claim:
1. A computerized speech synthesizer for synthesizing prosodic speech from text, the speech synthesizer comprising non-transitory computer-readable storage media, the computer-readable storage media storing software and data that when executed by a computer implements: a) a text parser to parse text to be synthesized for syntax and meaning, and to identify text elements individually expressible with acoustic phonemes; b) a prosodic parser to associate prosodic tags with the text elements identified, the prosodic tags indicating pronunciations for the respective text elements to provide desired prosodic characteristics in the output speech; c) a phoneme database comprising a basic phoneme set, the basic phoneme set including at least about 80 acoustic phonemes useful to express the text elements, each acoustic phoneme having a respective waveform; d) graphemes to represent the text elements, the graphemes comprising text characters, or symbols representing text characters, wherein each grapheme can be matched with an acoustic phoneme equivalent of the grapheme; and e) a speech synthesis unit to select, sequence, and assemble acoustic phonemes from the phoneme database, the acoustic phonemes being selected to correspond with respective ones of the text elements and their associated prosodic tags, and to generate a prosodic speech signal from the assembled acoustic phonemes as a wave signal; wherein assembly of the acoustic phonemes includes pitch synchronously connecting one selected acoustic phoneme to the next selected acoustic phoneme, the next selected acoustic phoneme having a significantly different pitch from the pitch of the one selected acoustic phoneme, by generating and interposing one or more artificial waveforms between the one selected acoustic phoneme and the next selected acoustic phoneme to transition the prosodic speech signal from the pitch of the one selected acoustic phoneme to the pitch of the next selected acoustic phoneme.

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Claim 12:
12. A computerized speech synthesizer according to claim 1 , wherein the computerized speech synthesizer comprises acoustic phonemes for producing pronunciations of the parsed text representing different prosody styles.