3450results about "Speech synthesis" patented technology

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

A voice-enabled document system facilitates execution of service delivery operations by eliminating the need for manual or visual interaction during information retrieval by an operator. Access to voice-enabled documents can facilitate operations for mobile vendors, on-site or field-service repairs, medical service providers, food service providers, and the like. Service providers can access the voice-enabled documents by using a client device to retrieve the document, display it on a screen, and, via voice commands initiate playback of selected audio files containing information derived from text data objects selected from the document. Data structures that are components of a voice-enabled document include audio playback files and a logical association that links the audio playback files to user-selectable fields, and to a set of voice commands.

An ontology-based parser incorporates both a system and method for converting natural-language text into predicate-argument format that can be easily used by a variety of applications, including search engines, summarization applications, categorization applications, and word processors. The ontology-based parser contains functional components for receiving documents in a plurality of formats, tokenizing them into instances of concepts from an ontology, and assembling the resulting concepts into predicates. The ontological parser has two major functional elements, a sentence lexer and a parser. The sentence lexer takes a sentence and converts it into a sequence of ontological entities that are tagged with part-of-speech information. The parser converts the sequence of ontological entities into predicate structures using a two-stage process that analyzes the grammatical structure of the sentence, and then applies rules to it that bind arguments into predicates.

A conversational computing system that provides a universal coordinated multi-modal conversational user interface (CUI) (10) across a plurality of conversationally aware applications (11) (i.e., applications that “speak” conversational protocols) and conventional applications (12). The conversationally aware maps, applications (11) communicate with a conversational kernel (14) via conversational application APIs (13). The conversational kernel (14) controls the dialog across applications and devices (local and networked) on the basis of their registered conversational capabilities and requirements and provides a unified conversational user interface and conversational services and behaviors. The conversational computing system may be built on top of a conventional operating system and APIs (15) and conventional device hardware (16). The conversational kernel (14) handles all I/O processing and controls conversational engines (18). The conversational kernel (14) converts voice requests into queries and converts outputs and results into spoken messages using conversational engines (18) and conversational arguments (17). The conversational application API (13) conveys all the information for the conversational kernel (14) to transform queries into application calls and conversely convert output into speech, appropriately sorted before being provided to the user.

Media metadata is accessible for a plurality of media items (See FIG. 12). The media metadata includes a number of strings to identify information regarding the media items (See FIG. 12). Phonetic metadata is associated the number of strings of the media metadata (See FIG. 12). Each portion of the phonetic metadata is stored in an original language of the string (See FIG. 12).

A human-computer interface system and methods for providing intelligent, adaptive, multimodal interaction with users while accomplishing tasks on their behalf in some particular domain or combination of domains. Specifically, this system accepts user input via natural language text, mouse actions, human speech, whistles, gestures, pedal movements, facial or postural changes, and conveys results via natural language text, automatically-generated speech, and displays of graphs, tables, animation, video, and mechanical and chemical effectors that convey heat, tactile sensation, taste and smell.

An electronic translator translates input speech into multiple streams of data that are simultaneously delivered to the user, such as a hearing impaired individual. Preferably, the data is delivered in audible, visual and text formats. These multiple data streams are delivered to the hearing-impaired individual in a synchronized fashion, thereby creating a cognitive response. Preferably, the system of the present invention converts the input speech to a text format, and then translates the text to any of three other forms, including sign language, animation and computer generated speech. The sign language and animation translations are preferably implemented by using the medium of digital movies in which videos of a person signing words, phrase and finger spelled words, and of animations corresponding to the words, are selectively accessed from databases and displayed. Additionally the received speech is converted to computer-generated speech for input to various hearing enhancement devices used by the deaf or hearing-impaired, such as cochlear implants and hearing aids, or other output devices such as speakers, etc. The data streams are synchronized utilizing a high-speed personal computer to facilitate sufficiently fast processing that the text, video signing and audible streams can be generated simultaneously in real time. Once synchronized the data streams are presented to the subject concurrently in a method that allows the process of mental comprehension to occur. The electronic translator can also be interfaced to other communications devices, such as telephones. Preferably, the hearing-impaired person is also able to use the system's keyboard or mouse to converse or respond.

There is provided a system for supporting interactive operations for inputting user commands to a household electric apparatus such as a television set/monitor and information apparatuses. According to the system for supporting interactive operations applying an animated character called a personified assistant interacting with a user based on speech synthesis and animation, realizing a user-friendly user interface and simultaneously making it possible to meet a demand for complex commands or providing an entry for services. Further, since the system is provided with a command system producing an effect close to human natural language, the user can easily operate the apparatus with a feeling close to ordinary human conversation.

A speech translation system and methods for cross-lingual communication that enable users to improve and modify content and usage of the system and easily abort or reset translation. The system includes a speech recognition module configured for accepting an utterance, a machine translation module, an interface configured to communicate the utterance and proposed translation, a correction module and an abort action unit that removes any hypotheses or partial hypotheses and terminates translation. The system also includes modules for storing favorites, changing language mode, automatically identifying language, providing language drills, viewing third party information relevant to conversation, among other things.

A customized animation video system and method generate a customized or personalized animated video using user input where the customized animated video is rendered in a near immediate timeframe (for example, in less than 10 minutes). The customized animation video system and method of the present invention enable seamless integration of an animated representation of a subject or other custom object into the animated video. That is, the system and method of the present invention enable the generation of an animated representation of a subject that can be viewed from any desired perspective in the animated video without the use of multiple photographs or other 2D depictions of the subject. Furthermore, the system and method of the present invention enables the generation of an animated representation of a subject that is in the same graphic style as the rest of the animated video.

A method and apparatus are provided for updating the vocabulary of a speech translation system for translating a first language into a second language including written and spoken words. The method includes adding a new word in the first language to a first recognition lexicon of the first language and associating a description with the new word, wherein the description contains pronunciation and word class information. The new word and description are then updated in a first machine translation module associated with the first language. The first machine translation module contains a first tagging module, a first translation model and a first language module, and is configured to translate the new word to a corresponding translated word in the second language. Optionally, the invention may be used for bidirectional or multi-directional translation

The error rate of a pronunciation guesser that guesses the phonetic spelling of words used in speech recognition is improved by causing its training to weigh letter-to-phoneme mappings used as data in such training as a function of the frequency of the words in which such mappings occur. Preferably the ratio of the weight to word frequency increases as word frequencies decreases. Acoustic phoneme models for use in speech recognition with phonetic spellings generated by a pronunciation guesser that makes errors are trained against word models whose phonetic spellings have been generated by a pronunciation guesser that makes similar errors. As a result, the acoustic models represent blends of phoneme sounds that reflect the spelling errors made by the pronunciation guessers. Speech recognition enabled systems are made by storing in them both a pronunciation guesser and a corresponding set of such blended acoustic models.

A system and method generate synthesized speech through concatenation of speech segments that are derived from a large prosodically-rich corpus of speech segments including using an additional dictionary of speech segment identifier sequences.

A text processing system for processing multi-lingual text for a speech synthesizer includes a first language dependent module for performing at least one of text and prosody analysis on a portion of input text comprising a first language. A second language dependent module performs at least one of text and prosody analysis on a second portion of input text comprising a second language. A third module is adapted to receive outputs from the first and second dependent module and performs prosodic and phonetic context abstraction over the outputs based on multi-lingual text.

The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for explicit filtering in ambiguous text entry. The invention provides embodiments including various explicit text entry methodologies, such as 2-key and long pressing. The invention also provides means for matching words in a database using build around methodology, stem locking methodology, word completion methodology, and n-gram searches.

A system for substantially automating transcription services for multiple voice users including a manual transcription station, a speech recognition program and a routing program. The system establishes a profile for each of the voice users containing a training status which is selected from the group of enrollment, training, automated and stop automation. When the system receives a voice dictation file from a current voice user based on the training status the system routes the voice dictation file to a manual transcription station and the speech recognition program. A human transcriptionist creates transcribed files for each received voice dictation files. The speech recognition program automatically creates a written text for each received voice dictation file if the training status of the current user is training or automated. A verbatim file is manually established if the training status of the current user is enrollment or training and the speech recognition program is trained with an acoustic model for the current user using the verbatim file and the voice dictation file if the training status of the current user is enrollment or training. The transcribed file is returned to the current user if the training status of the current user is enrollment or training or the written text is returned if the training status of the current user is automated. An apparatus and method is also disclosed for simplifying the manual establishment of the verbatim file. A method for substantially automating transcription services is also disclosed.

A speech control system that can recognize a spoken command and associated words (such as “call mom at home”) and can cause a selected application (such as a telephone dialer) to execute the command to cause a data processing system, such as a smartphone, to perform an operation based on the command (such as look up mom's phone number at home and dial it to establish a telephone call). The speech control system can use a set of interpreters to repair recognized text from a speech recognition system, and results from the set can be merged into a final repaired transcription which is provided to the selected application.

Systems and processes for detecting and/or providing a whispered speech response are provided. In one example process, speech is received from a user, and based on the speech input, determined that a whispered speech response is to be provided. Upon determining that a whispered speech response is to be provided, the whispered speech response is generated and provided to the user.

Techniques for improved text-to-speech processing are disclosed. The improved text-to-speech processing can convert text from an electronic document into an audio output that includes speech associated with the text as well as audio contextual cues. One aspect provides audio contextual cues to the listener when outputting speech (spoken text) pertaining to a document. The audio contextual cues can be based on an analysis of a document prior to a text-to-speech conversion. Another aspect can produce an audio summary for a file. The audio summary for a document can thereafter be presented to a user so that the user can hear a summary of the document without having to process the document to produce its spoken text via text-to-speech conversion.

A system for delivering customized audio content to customers. A central processing site (120) is coupled with content providers (110) through a network (142). The central processing consists of a number of components, namely content classification system (200), user preference management (400), content conversion system (500), content delivery system (600), and user authentication (300).

At least one exemplary embodiment is directed to an earpiece comprising: an ambient microphone; an ear canal microphone; an ear canal receiver; a sealing section; a logic circuit; a communication module; a memory storage unit,; and a user interaction element, where the user interaction element is configured to send a play command to the logic circuit when activated by a user where the logic circuit reads registration parameters stored on the memory storage unit and sends audio content to the ear canal receiver according to the registration parameters.

A method and system of customizing voice translation of a text to speech includes digitally recording speech samples of a known speaker, correlating each of the speech samples with a standardized audio representation, and organizing the recorded speech samples and correlated audio representations into a collection. The collection of speech samples correlated with audio representations is saved as a single voice file and stored in a device capable of translating the text to speech. The voice file is applied to a translation of text to speech so that the translated speech is customized according to the applied voice file.

A text-to-pronunciation system (11) includes a large training set of word pronunciations (19) and an extractor for extracting language specific information from the training set to produce pronunciations for words not in its training set. A learner (13) forms pronunciation guesses for words in the training set and for finding a transformation rule that improves the guesses. A rule applier (15) applies the transformation rule found to guesses. The learner (13) repeats the finding of another rule and the rule applier (15) applies the new rule to find the rules that improves the guesses the most.

Algorithms for synthesizing speech used to identify media assets are provided. Speech may be selectively synthesized form text strings associated with media assets. A text string may be normalized and its native language determined for obtaining a target phoneme for providing human-sounding speech in a language (e.g., dialect or accent) that is familiar to a user. The algorithms may be implemented on a system including several dedicated render engines. The system may be part of a back end coupled to a front end including storage for media assets and associated synthesized speech, and a request processor for receiving and processing requests that result in providing the synthesized speech. The front end may communicate media assets and associated synthesized speech content over a network to host devices coupled to portable electronic devices on which the media assets and synthesized speech are played back.

Algorithms for synthesizing speech used to identify media assets are provided. Speech may be selectively synthesized form text strings associated with media assets. A text string may be normalized and its native language determined for obtaining a target phoneme for providing human-sounding speech in a language (e.g., dialect or accent) that is familiar to a user. The algorithms may be implemented on a system including several dedicated render engines. The system may be part of a back end coupled to a front end including storage for media assets and associated synthesized speech, and a request processor for receiving and processing requests that result in providing the synthesized speech. The front end may communicate media assets and associated synthesized speech content over a network to host devices coupled to portable electronic devices on which the media assets and synthesized speech are played back.

Pronunciation correction for text-to-speech (TTS) systems and speech recognition (SR) systems between different languages is provided. If a word requiring pronunciation by a target language TTS or SR is from a same language as the target language, but is not found in a lexicon of words from the target language, a letter-to-speech (LTS) rules set of the target language is used to generate a letter-to-speech output for the word for use by the TTS or SR configured according to the target language. If the word is from a different language as the target language, phonemes comprising the word according to its native language are mapped to phonemes of the target language. The phoneme mapping is used by the TTS or SR configured according to the target language for generating or recognizing an audible form of the word according to the target language.

Many embodiments may comprise logic such as hardware and/or code to implement user interface for traversal of long sorted lists, via audible mapping of the lists, using sensor based gesture recognition, audio and tactile feedback and button selection while on the go. In several embodiments, such user interface modalities are physically small in size, enabling a user to be truly mobile by reducing the cognitive load required to operate the device. For some embodiments, the user interface may be divided across multiple worn devices, such as a mobile device, watch, earpiece, and ring. Rotation of the watch may be translated into navigation instructions, allowing the user to traverse the list while the user receives audio feedback via the earpiece to describe items in the list as well as audio feedback regarding the navigation state. Many embodiments offer the user a simple user interface to traverse the list without visual feedback.

An apparatus comprising a session file, session file editor, annotation window, concatenation software and training software. The session file includes one or more audio files and text associated with each audio file segment. The session file editor displays text and provides text selection capability and plays back audio. The annotation window operably associated with the session file editor supports user modification of the selected text, the annotation window saves modified text corresponding to the selected text from the session file editor and audio associated with the modified text. The concatenation software concatenates modified text and audio associated therewith for two or more instances of the selected text. The training software trains a speech user profile using a concatenated file formed by the concatenating software. The session file may have original audio associated with the selected text, wherein the apparatus further comprises software for substituting the modified text for the selected text. In some embodiments, the concatenation software concatenates modified text and audio associated therewith for two or more instances of the selected text. In some embodiments, the training software trains a speech user profile using a concatenated file formed by the concatenating software.

A capture system captures detectable attributes of a user. A differential system compares the detectable attributes with a normalized model of attributes, wherein the normalized model of attributes characterize normal representative attribute values across a sample of a plurality of users and generates differential attributes representing the differences between the detectable attributes and the normalized model of attributes. Multiple separate avatar creator systems receive the differential attributes and each apply the differential attributes to different base avatars to create custom avatars which reflect a selection of the detectable attributes of the user which are distinguishable from the normalized model of attributes.

According to one embodiment, a method, apparatus for synthesizing speech, and a method for training acoustic model used in speech synthesis is provided. The method for synthesizing speech may include determining data generated by text analysis as fuzzy heteronym data, performing fuzzy heteronym prediction on the fuzzy heteronym data to output a plurality of candidate pronunciations of the fuzzy heteronym data and probabilities thereof, generating fuzzy context feature labels based on the plurality of candidate pronunciations and probabilities thereof, determining model parameters for the fuzzy context feature labels based on acoustic model with fuzzy decision tree, generating speech parameters from the model parameters, and synthesizing the speech parameters via synthesizer as speech.