Reactive speech synthesis

A method of responding to an interruption in a speech synthesis system (e.g. conversational agents, AI therapists, virtual personal assistants). In response to an interruption event (e.g. when a user has tried to interrupt the dialogue), the system takes an input of the reaction type and earliest ti...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors David Braude, Matthew Aylett, Christopher Pidcock, Blaise Potard
Format Patent
LanguageEnglish
Published 20.02.2019
Subjects
ACOUSTICS
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
PHYSICS
SPEECH ANALYSIS OR SYNTHESIS
SPEECH OR AUDIO CODING OR DECODING
SPEECH OR VOICE PROCESSING
SPEECH RECOGNITION
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Summary:A method of responding to an interruption in a speech synthesis system (e.g. conversational agents, AI therapists, virtual personal assistants). In response to an interruption event (e.g. when a user has tried to interrupt the dialogue), the system takes an input of the reaction type and earliest time. A new audio is then created which is suitable for splicing. The system then modifies the audio (e.g. selecting different units, applying DSP modification, stopping before the end of the text) based on the type of modification, to introduce different speaking styles to provide a natural response at a speech interface. The interruption may be configured within a particular region such as a phonetic region, word boundary region, and phase level region. Appropriate settings may also be chosen such as switch to Lombard speech or tailing off in a polite manner.
Bibliography:Application Number: GB20170013273