Inventors:
Alistair D. Conkie - Morristown NJ
International Classification:
G10L 1308
Abstract:
A system and method for improving the response time of text-to-speech synthesis utilizes âtriphone contextsâ (i. e. , triplets comprising a central phoneme and its immediate context) as the basic unit, instead of performing phoneme-by-phoneme synthesis. Prior to initiating the âreal timeâ synthesis, a database is created of ail possible triphones (there are approximately 10000 in the English language) and their associated preselection costs. At run time, therefore, only the most likely candidates are selected from the triphone database, significantly reducing the calculations that are required to be performed in real time.