| abstract |
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 1 -u 2 -u 3 , 2) calculating a preselection cost for each 5-phoneme sequence u a -u 1 -u 2 -u 3 -u b , where u 2 is allowed to match any identically labeled phoneme in a database and the units u a and u b vary 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. |