114 results about "Text to speech conversion" patented technology

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 is disclosed for integrating electronic mail, voice mail, and fax mail in a universal mailbox. Message receivers may access their messages with a telephone or a computer regardless of the communication medium used by the message sender. Using a telephone, message receivers may playback voice mail, redirect fax mail, and "listen" to e-mail through a text-to-speech conversion process. Using a computer and modem, message receivers may playback voice mail, view fax mail, and read e-mail by accessing the universal mailbox via connection software. Message senders and receivers may choose from a variety of filter and forward options that allow them to manage their communications via the universal mailbox. Forwarding and conversion of messages is performed automatically. The options are used to define a set of rules to be applied to inbound and outbound messages so that messages are sent and received in accordance with the preferences of the senders and receivers.

A method and system for providing text-to-audio conversion of an electronic book displayed on a viewer. A user selects a portion of displayed text and converts it into audio. The text-to-audio conversion may be performed via a header file and pre-recorded audio for each electronic book, via text-to-speech conversion, or other available means. The user may select manual or automatic text-to audio conversion. The automatic text-to-audio conversion may be performed by automatically turning the pages of the electronic book or by the user manually turning the pages. The user may also select to convert the entire electronic book, or portions of it, into audio. The user may also select an option to receive an audio definition of a particular word in the electronic book. The present invention allows a user to control the system by selecting options from a screen or by entering voice commands.

A system and method includes a detecting computer readable text associated with a device, detecting a starting point for a text-to-speech conversion of text, beginning the text-to-speech conversion upon detection of movement of a pointing device in a direction of text flow, and controlling a rate of the text-to-speech conversion based on a rate of movement of the pointing device in relation to the text to be converted.

A method for distance definition in a text-to-speech conversion system by applying Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to a distance definition. According to an embodiment, the text that is to be subjected to text-to-speech conversion is analyzed to obtain a text with descriptive prosody annotation; clustering is performed for samples in the obtained text; and a GMM model is generated for each cluster, to determine the distance between the sample and the corresponding GMM model.

A personal interactive voice response system with a web-based interface allowing the user to specify treatment of incoming calls based on voice or touchtone responses provided by the calling party. A graphical user interface available over a computer network, such as the Internet, allows the user to personalize greetings that callers hear, as well as customizing treatment of callers based on the caller's response. The user may record an initial greeting or other messages, either over the telephone or over the Internet, so that the messages are played to callers in the user's voice. Additionally, the user may enter text, via a PC or wireless device connected to the Internet, that is played back for the caller, based on the caller's response, via text-to-speech conversion using voice extensible markup language technology. Resulting actions, such as call forwarding, distinctive ringing, or remote notification of the incoming call may also be included.

Embodiments herein provide/acquire a document in electronic form (e.g., by receiving, copying, retrieving from storage, scanning combined with optical character recognition, etc.) and receive user input regarding visual impairment. In response to one or more levels of user visual impairment, embodiments herein automatically change (for example, immediately after scanning text) an appearance of the document, without requiring any user input, other than the visual impairment input. More specifically, when changing the appearance of the document, embodiments herein can increase the size of characters in the document, change the contrast or coloring of the text and/or background, and provide text-to-speech conversion of the document, thereby (in one embodiment) producing audio output of the text-to-speech conversion in coordination with a corresponding portion of the document being displayed. When changing the appearance of the document, embodiments herein also reformat the document (e.g., around graphic elements) to accommodate the increased size of the characters.

A cellular phone is provided with a media scanning capability. Scanner optics, an optional light source and related scanning circuitry is integrated within a cellular phone to enable image or text scanning, facsimile, text-to-speech conversion, and language translation. Position sensors provide position data as the scanner is manually moved, in one or more passes across the scanned media, to enable a bit-mapped image of the strip to be created in a data buffer. Image data from the strips is processed to remove redundant overlap data and skew position errors, to give a bit-mapped final image of the entire scanned item. Image compression is provided to compress the image into standard JPEG format for storage or transmission, or into facsimile format for transmission of the document to any fax machine. Optical character recognition (OCR) is provided to convert image data to text which may be sent as email, locally displayed, stored for later use, or further processed. Further processing of text data includes language translation and text to speech conversion of either the original or translated text. The resulting speech audio can be heard locally or transmitted over the cellular network.

A communications system may include at least one mobile wireless communications device, and a wireless communications network for sending text messages thereto. More particularly, the at least one mobile wireless communications device may include a wireless transceiver and a controller for cooperating therewith for receiving text messages from the wireless communications network. It may further include a headset output connected to the controller. The controller may be for switching between a normal message mode and an audio message mode based upon a connection between the headset output and a headset. Moreover, when in the audio message mode, the controller may output at least one audio message including speech generated from at least one of the received text messages via the headset output.

Descriptions of visually presented material are provided to one or more conference participants that do not have video capabilities. This presented material could be any one or more of a document, PowerPoint® presentation, spreadsheet, Webex® presentation, whiteboard, chalkboard, interactive whiteboard, description of a flowchart, picture, or in general, any information visually presented at a conference. For this visually presented information, descriptions thereof are assembled and forwarded via one or more of a message, SMS message, whisper channel, text information, non-video channel, MSRP, or the like, to one or more conference participant endpoints. These descriptions of visually presented information, such as a document, spreadsheet, spreadsheet presentation, multi-media presentation, or the like, can be assembled in cooperation with one or more of OCR recognition and text-to-speech conversion, human input, or the like.

A system for providing text-to-speech conversion of a body of text is presented. The system includes a first executable resource which generates text portions from the body of text in response to receiving an initial web request to convert the body of text to speech and provides an output in response to generating the text portions comprising a sequence of resource identifiers suitable for use in the text-to-speech conversion of the text portions. The system further includes a second executable resource which receives a text portion web request that requests the conversion of at least one text portion to an audio format, the text portion web request comprising the at least one text portion and one of the resource identifiers, and further provides at least one media file suitable for audio output based on the text portion web request.

A text-to-speech conversion system that includes a first module to convert text into words, a second module to convert words into phonemes, a third module to map phonemes to sound units, and a storage unit to store speech representations for a library of sound units. The first, second, and third modules and the storage unit are implemented within a single integrated circuit to reduce size and cost. The system typically further includes a ROM to store the codes for the modules, a RAM to store the text and intermediate results, a processor to execute the codes for the modules, a control module to direct the operation of the first, second, and third modules. The storage unit may be implemented with a multi-level, non-volatile analog storage array and may be programmed with a new library of speech representations by a programming module.

A method (and associated apparatus) comprises associating a mood tag with text. The mood tag specifies a mood to be applied when the text is subsequently converted to an audio signal. In accordance with another embodiment, a method (and associated apparatus) comprises receiving text having an associated mood tag and converting the text to speech in accordance with the associated mood tag.

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for text to speech conversion, and a method and apparatus for adjusting a corpus. The method for text to speech comprises: text analysis step for parsing the text to obtain descriptive prosody annotations of the text based on a TTS model generated from a first corpus; prosody parameter prediction step for predicting the prosody parameter of the text according to the result of text analysis step; speech synthesis step for synthesizing speech of said text based on said the prosody parameter of the text; wherein descriptive prosody annotations of the text include prosody structure for the text, the prosody structure of the text is adjusted according to a target speech speed for the synthesized speech. The present invention adjusts the prosody structure of the text according to the target speech speed. The synthesized speech will have improved quality.

Techniques that enable a user to select, from among multiple languages, a language to be used for performing text-to-speech conversion. In some embodiments, upon determining that multiple languages may be used to perform text-to-speech conversion for a portion of text, the multiple languages may be displayed to the user. The user may then select a particular language to be used from the multiple languages. The portion of text may then be converted to speech in the user-selected language.