MICROSEGMENT-BASED SPEECH-SYNTHESIS PROCESS

摘要

The invention concerns a digital speech-synthesis process whereby utterances in a language are recorded, the recorded utterances are divided into speech segments which are stored so as to allow their allocation to specific phonemes; a text which is to be output as speech is converted to a phoneme chain and the stored segments are output in a sequence defined by the phoneme chain; an analysis of the text to be output as speech is carried out and thus provides information which completes the phoneme chain and modifies the timing sequence signal for the speech segments which are to be strung together for output as speech. The invention is characterised by the use of, as speech segments, microsegments consisting of: segments for vowel halves and semi-vowel halves, vowels standing between consonants being split into two microsegments, a first vowel half beginning shortly before the start of the vowel and extending as far as the vowel middle, and a second vowel half from the vowel middle to just before the vowel end; segments for quasi-stationary vowel components cut from the middle of a vowel; consonant segments beginning shortly before the front phoneme boundary and ending shortly before the rear phoneme boundary; and segments for vowel-vowel sequences cut from the middle of a vowel-vowel transition.