Patents by Inventor Geert Coorman

Geert Coorman has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 9031834
    Abstract: The method provides a spectral speech description to be used for synthesis of a speech utterance, where at least one spectral envelope input representation is received. In one solution the improvement is made by manipulation an extremum, i.e. a peak or a valley, in the rapidly varying component of the spectral envelope representation. The rapidly varying component of the spectral envelope representation is manipulated to sharpen and/or accentuate extrema after which it is merged back with the slowly varying component or the spectral envelope input representation to create an enhanced spectral envelope final representation. In other solutions a complex spectrum envelope final representation is created with phase information derived from one of the group delay representation of a real spectral envelope input representation corresponding to a short-time speech signal and a transformed phase component of the discrete complex frequency domain input representation corresponding to the speech utterance.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 4, 2009
    Date of Patent: May 12, 2015
    Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc.
    Inventors: Geert Coorman, Johan Wouters
  • Publication number: 20120265534
    Abstract: The method provides a spectral speech description to be used for synthesis of a speech utterance, where at least one spectral envelope input representation is received. In one solution the improvement is made by manipulation an extremum, i.e. a peak or a valley, in the rapidly varying component of the spectral envelope representation. The rapidly varying component of the spectral envelope representation is manipulated to sharpen and/or accentuate extrema after which it is merged back with the slowly varying component or the spectral envelope input representation to create an enhanced spectral envelope final representation. In other solutions a complex spectrum envelope final representation is created with phase information derived from one of the group delay representation of a real spectral envelope input representation corresponding to a short-time speech signal and a transformed phase component of the discrete complex frequency domain input representation corresponding to the speech utterance.
    Type: Application
    Filed: September 4, 2009
    Publication date: October 18, 2012
    Applicant: SVOX AG
    Inventors: Geert Coorman, Johan Wouters
  • Patent number: 7567896
    Abstract: A system and method generate synthesized speech through concatenation of speech segments that are derived from a large prosodically-rich corpus of speech segments including using an additional dictionary of speech segment identifier sequences.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 18, 2005
    Date of Patent: July 28, 2009
    Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc.
    Inventors: Geert Coorman, Vincent Pollet, Stefaan Van Gerven, Mario De Bock, Bert Van Coile, Jan De Moortel
  • Patent number: 7219060
    Abstract: A high quality speech synthesizer in various embodiments concatenates speech waveforms referenced by a large speech database. Speech quality is further improved by speech unit selection and concatenation smoothing.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 1, 2003
    Date of Patent: May 15, 2007
    Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc.
    Inventors: Geert Coorman, Filip Deprez, Mario De Bock, Justin Fackrell, Steven Leys, Peter Rutten, Jan De Moortel, Andre Schenk, Bert Van Coile
  • Patent number: 7058569
    Abstract: A synthesis method for concatenative speech synthesis is provided for efficiently concatenating waveform segments in the time-domain. A digital waveform provider produces an input sequence of digital waveform segments. A waveform concatenator concatenates the input segments by using waveform blending within a concatenation zone to synchronize, weight, and overlap-add selected portions of the input segments to produce a single digital waveform. The synchronizing includes determining a minimum weighted energy anchor in the selected portion of each input segment and aligning synchronization peaks in a local vicinity of each anchor.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 14, 2001
    Date of Patent: June 6, 2006
    Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc.
    Inventors: Geert Coorman, Bert Van Coile
  • Publication number: 20050182629
    Abstract: A system and method generate synthesized speech through concatenation of speech segments that are derived from a large prosodically-rich corpus of speech segments including using an additional dictionary of speech segment identifier sequences.
    Type: Application
    Filed: January 18, 2005
    Publication date: August 18, 2005
    Inventors: Geert Coorman, Vincent Pollet, Stefaan Van Gerven, Mario De Bock, Bert Van Coile, Jan De Moortel
  • Publication number: 20040111266
    Abstract: A high quality speech synthesizer in various embodiments concatenates speech waveforms referenced by a large speech database. Speech quality is further improved by speech unit selection and concatenation smoothing.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 1, 2003
    Publication date: June 10, 2004
    Inventors: Geert Coorman, Filip Deprez, Mario De Bock, Justin Fackrell, Steven Leys, Peter Rutten, Jan DeMoortel, Andre Schenk, Bert Van Coile
  • Patent number: 6665641
    Abstract: A high quality speech synthesizer in various embodiments concatenates speech waveforms referenced by a large speech database. Speech quality is further improved by speech unit selection and concatenation smoothing.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 12, 1999
    Date of Patent: December 16, 2003
    Assignee: ScanSoft, Inc.
    Inventors: Geert Coorman, Filip Deprez, Mario De Bock, Justin Fackrell, Steven Leys, Peter Rutten, Jan DeMoortel, Andre Schenk, Bert Van Coile
  • Publication number: 20020143526
    Abstract: A synthesis method for concatenative speech synthesis is provided for efficiently concatenating waveform segments in the time-domain. A digital waveform provider produces an input sequence of digital waveform segments. A waveform concatenator concatenates the input segments by using waveform blending within a concatenation zone to synchronize, weight, and overlap-add selected portions of the input segments to produce a single digital waveform. The synchronizing includes determining a minimum weighted energy anchor in the selected portion of each input segment and aligning synchronization peaks in a local vicinity of each anchor.
    Type: Application
    Filed: September 14, 2001
    Publication date: October 3, 2002
    Inventors: Geert Coorman, Bert Van Coile
  • Publication number: 20020133334
    Abstract: A system is disclosed for generating a time scale modification of a digital waveform. A digital waveform provider produces an input digital waveform at a first time resolution, the digital waveform being a sequence of overlapping speech segment windows. A time-domain time scale modification process overlap adds selected windows from the input digital waveform to create an output digital waveform representing a time scale modification of the input digital waveform. The process operates at a second time resolution lower than the first time resolution to determine the relative positions between adjacent windows in the output digital waveform.
    Type: Application
    Filed: February 2, 2001
    Publication date: September 19, 2002
    Inventors: Geert Coorman, Peter Rutten, Jan DeMoortel, Bert Van Coile