Abstract: Disclosed are systems, methods, and computer readable media for performing speech synthesis. The method embodiment comprises applying a first part of a speech synthesizer to a text corpus to obtain a plurality of phoneme sequences, the first part of the speech synthesizer only identifying possible phoneme sequences, for each of the obtained plurality of phoneme sequences, identifying joins that would be calculated to synthesize each of the plurality of respective phoneme sequences, and adding the identified joins to a cache for use in speech synthesis.

Abstract: According to one embodiment, searching media includes receiving a search query comprising search terms. At least one search term is expanded to yield a set of conceptually equivalent terms. The set of conceptually equivalent terms is converted to a set of search phonemes. Files that record phonemes are searched according to the set of search phonemes. A file that includes a phoneme that matches at least one search phoneme is selected and output to a client.

Abstract: A system and method for generating synthetic speech, which operates in a computer implemented Text-To-Speech system. The system comprises at least a speaker database that has been previously created from user recordings, a Front-End system to receive an input text and a Text-To-Speech engine. The Front-End system generates multiple phonetic transcriptions for each word of the input text, and the TTS engine uses a cost function to select which phonetic transcription is the more appropriate for searching the speech segments within the speaker database to be concatenated and synthesized.

Abstract: One provides (101) a plurality of frames of sampled audio content and then processes (102) that plurality of frames using a speech recognition search process that comprises, at least in part, determining whether to search each subword boundary contained within each frame on a frame-by-frame basis. These teachings will also readily accommodate determining whether to search each word boundary contained within each frame on a frame-by-frame basis.