Alistair David Conkie

6505158, Jan 7, 2003

Jul 5, 2000

09/609889

Alistair D. Conkie - Morristown NJ

ATT Corp. - New York NY

G10L 1308

704260, 704268

A method and system for providing concatenative speech uses a speech synthesis input to populate a triphone-indexed database that is later used for searching and retrieval to create a phoneme string acceptable for a text-to-speech operation. Prior to initiating the âreal timeâ synthesis, a database is created of all possible triphone contexts by inputting a continuous stream of speech. The speech data is then analyzed to identify all possible triphone sequences in the stream, and the various units chosen for each context. During a later text-to-speech operation, the triphone contexts in the text are identified and the triphone-indexed phonemes in the database are searched to retrieve the best-matched candidates.

6684187, Jan 27, 2004

Jun 30, 2000

09/607615

Alistair D. Conkie - Morristown NJ

ATT Corp. - New York NY

G10L 1308

704260, 704258, 704266

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.

7013278, Mar 14, 2006

Sep 5, 2002

10/235401

Alistair D. Conkie - Morristown NJ, US

AT&T Corp. - New York NY

G10L 13/08

704260, 704266, 704268

A method for generating concatenative speech uses a speech synthesis input to populate a triphone-indexed database that is later used for searching and retrieval to create a phoneme string acceptable for a text-to-speech operation. Prior to initiating the “real time” synthesis process, a database is created of all possible triphone contexts by inputting a continuous stream of speech. The speech data is then analyzed to identify all possible triphone sequences in the stream, and the various units chosen for each context. During a later text-to-speech operation, the triphone contexts in the text are identified and the triphone-indexed phonemes in the database are searched to retrieve the best-matched candidates.

7124083, Oct 17, 2006

Nov 5, 2003

10/702154

Alistair D. Conkie - Morristown NJ, US

AT&T Corp. - New York NY

G10L 13/04

704266, 704254

A system and method for improving the response time of text-to-speech synthesis utilizes “triphone contexts” (i. e. , triplets comprising a central phoneme and its immediate context) as the basic unit, instead of performing phoneme-by-phoneme synthesis. The method comprises a method of generating a triphone preselection cost database for use in speech synthesis, the method comprising 1) selecting a triphone sequence u-u-u, 2) calculating a preselection cost for each 5-phoneme sequence u-u-u-u-u, where uis allowed to match any identically labeled phoneme in a database and the units uand uvary over the entire phoneme universe and 3) storing a group of the selected triphone sequences exhibiting the lowest costs in a triphone preselection cost database.

7233901, Jun 19, 2007

Dec 30, 2005

11/275432

Alistair D. Conkie - Morristown NJ, US

AT&T Corp. - New York NY

G10L 13/06

704260, 704266

A system and computer-readable medium synthesize speech from text using a triphone unit selection database. The instructions on the computer-readable medium control a computing device to perform the steps: receiving input text, selecting a plurality of N phoneme units from the triphone unit selection database as candidate phonemes for synthesized speech based on the input text, applying a cost process to select a set of phonemes from the candidate phonemes and synthesizing speech using the selected set of phonemes.

7266497, Sep 4, 2007

Jan 14, 2003

10/341869

Alistair D. Conkie - Morristown NJ, US

AT&T Corp. - New York NY

G10L 13/00

704258, 704256, 704266, 704253

Systems and methods for automatically segmenting speech inventories. A set of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are initialized using bootstrap data. The HMMs are next re-estimated and aligned to produce phone labels. The phone boundaries of the phone labels are then corrected using spectral boundary correction. Optionally, this process of using the spectral-boundary-corrected phone labels as input instead of the bootstrap data is performed iteratively in order to further reduce mismatches between manual labels and phone labels assigned by the HMM approach.

7460997, Dec 2, 2008

Aug 22, 2006

11/466229

Alistair D. Conkie - Morristown NJ, US

AT&T Intellectual Property II, L.P. - New York NY

G10L 13/00
G10L 13/06

704258, 704260, 704266

A system and method for improving the response time of text-to-speech synthesis utilizes “triphone contexts” (i. e. , triplets comprising a central phoneme and its immediate context) as the basic unit, instead of performing phoneme-by-phoneme synthesis. The method comprises a method of generating a triphone preselection cost database for use in speech synthesis, the method comprising 1) selecting a triphone sequence u-u-u, 2) calculating a preselection cost for each 5-phoneme sequence u-u-u-u-u, where uis allowed to match any identically labeled phoneme in a database and the units uand uvary over the entire phoneme universe and 3) storing a group of the selected triphone sequences exhibiting the lowest costs in a triphone preselection cost database.

7565291, Jul 21, 2009

May 15, 2007

11/748849

Alistair D. Conkie - Morristown NJ, US

AT&T Intellectual Property II, L.P. - New York NY

G10L 13/06

704258

The instructions on the computer-readable medium control a computing device to perform the steps: selecting at least one phoneme from a triphone unit selection database as at least candidate phoneme for use in speech synthesis, selecting a set of phonemes from the at least one candidate phonemes and synthesizing speech using the selected set of phonemes.