Abstract: A system for emulating a subject, to allow a user to interact with a computer generated talking head with the subject's face and voice; said system comprising a processor, a user interface and a personality storage section, the user interface being configured to emulate the subject, by displaying a talking head which comprises the subject's face and output speech from the mouth of the face with the subject's voice, the user interface further comprising a receiver for receiving a query from the user, the emulated subject being configured to respond to the query received from the user, the processor comprising a dialogue section and a talking head generation section, wherein said dialogue section is configured to generate a response to a query inputted by a user from the user interface and generate a response to be outputted by the talking head, the response being generated by retrieving information from said personality storage section, said personality storage section comprising content created by or about

Abstract: A method of training an acoustic model for a text-to-speech system, the method comprising: receiving speech data; said speech data comprising data corresponding to different values of a first speech factor, and wherein said speech data is unlabeled, such that for a given item of speech data, the value of said first speech factor is unknown; clustering said speech data according to the value of said first speech factor into a first set of clusters; and estimating a first set of parameters to enable the acoustic model to accommodate speech for the different values of the first speech factor, wherein said clustering and said first parameter estimation are jointly performed according to a common maximum likelihood criterion.

Abstract: A system for emulating a subject, to allow a user to interact with a computer generated talking head with the subject's face and voice; said system comprising a processor, a user interface and a personality storage section, the user interface being configured to emulate the subject, by displaying a talking head which comprises the subject's face and output speech from the mouth of the face with the subject's voice, the user interface further comprising a receiver for receiving a query from the user, the emulated subject being configured to respond to the query received from the user, the processor comprising a dialogue section and a talking head generation section, wherein said dialogue section is configured to generate a response to a query inputted by a user from the user interface and generate a response to be outputted by the talking head, the response being generated by retrieving information from said personality storage section, said personality storage section comprising content created by or about

Abstract: A system for emulating a subject, to allow a user to interact with a computer generated talking head with the subject's face and voice; said system comprising a processor, a user interface and a personality storage section, the user interface being configured to emulate the subject, by displaying a talking head which comprises the subject's face and output speech from the mouth of the face with the subject's voice, the user interface further comprising a receiver for receiving a query from the user, the emulated subject being configured to respond to the query received from the user, the processor comprising a dialogue section and a talking head generation section, wherein said dialogue section is configured to generate a response to a query inputted by a user from the user interface and generate a response to be outputted by the talking head, the response being generated by retrieving information from said personality storage section, said personality storage section comprising content created by or about

Abstract: A method of animating a computer generation of a head and displaying the text of an electronic book, such that the head has a mouth which moves in accordance with the speech of the text of the electronic book to be output by the head and a word or group of words from the text is displayed while simultaneously being mimed by the mouth, wherein input text is divided into a sequence of acoustic units, which are converted to a sequence of image vectors and into a sequence of text display indicators. The sequence of image vectors is outputted as video such that the mouth of said head moves to mime the speech associated with the input text with a selected expression, and the sequence of text display indicators is output as video which is synchronized with the lip movement of the head.

Abstract: A method of searching a plurality of data files, wherein each data file includes a plurality of features. The method: determines a plurality of feature groups, wherein each feature group includes n features and n is an integer of 2 or more; expresses each data file as a file vector, wherein each component of the vector indicates the frequency of a feature group within the data file, wherein the n features which constitute a feature group do not have to be located adjacent to one another; expresses a search query using the feature groups as a vector; and searches the plurality of data files by comparing the search query expressed as a vector with the file vectors.

Abstract: A method of training an acoustic model for a text-to-speech system, the method comprising: receiving speech data; said speech data comprising data corresponding to different values of a first speech factor, and wherein said speech data is unlabelled, such that for a given item of speech data, the value of said first speech factor is unknown; clustering said speech data according to the value of said first speech factor into a first set of clusters; and estimating a first set of parameters to enable the acoustic model to accommodate speech for the different values of the first speech factor, wherein said clustering and said first parameter estimation are jointly performed according to a common maximum likelihood criterion.

Abstract: A system for emulating a subject, to allow a user to interact with a computer generated talking head with the subject's face and voice; said system comprising a processor, a user interface and a personality storage section, the user interface being configured to emulate the subject, by displaying a talking head which comprises the subject's face and output speech from the mouth of the face with the subject's voice, the user interface further comprising a receiver for receiving a query from the user, the emulated subject being configured to respond to the query received from the user, the processor comprising a dialogue section and a talking head generation section, wherein said dialogue section is configured to generate a response to a query inputted by a user from the user interface and generate a response to be outputted by the talking head, the response being generated by retrieving information from said personality storage section, said personality storage section comprising content created by or about

Abstract: A method of animating a computer generation of a head and displaying the text of an electronic book, such that the head has a mouth which moves in accordance with the speech of the text of the electronic book to be output by the head and a word or group of words from the text is displayed while simultaneously being mimed by the mouth, said method comprising: inputting the text of said book; dividing said input text into a sequence of acoustic units; determining expression characteristics for the inputted text; calculating a duration for each acoustic unit using a duration model; converting said sequence of acoustic units to a sequence of image vectors using a statistical model, wherein said model has a plurality of model parameters describing probability distributions which relate an acoustic unit to an image vector, said image vector comprising a plurality of parameters which define a face of said head; converting said sequence of acoustic units into a sequence of text display indicators using an text dis

Abstract: A text to speech method, the method comprising: receiving input text; dividing said inputted text into a sequence of acoustic units; converting said sequence of acoustic units to a sequence of speech vectors using an acoustic model, wherein said model has a plurality of model parameters describing probability distributions which relate an acoustic unit to a speech vector; and outputting said sequence of speech vectors as audio, the method further comprising determining at least some of said model parameters by: extracting expressive features from said input text to form an expressive linguistic feature vector constructed in a first space; and mapping said expressive linguistic feature vector to an expressive synthesis feature vector which is constructed in a second space.

Abstract: A system for calculating the look ahead probabilities at the nodes in a language model look ahead tree, wherein the words of the vocabulary of the language are located at the leaves of the tree, said apparatus comprising: means to assign a language model probability to each of the words of the vocabulary using a first low order language model; means to calculate the language look ahead probabilities for all nodes in said tree using said first language model; means to determine if the language model probability of one or more words of said vocabulary can be calculated using a higher order language model and updating said words with the higher order language model; and means to update the look ahead probability at only the nodes which are affected by the words where the language model has been updated.

Abstract: A method of searching a plurality of data files, wherein each data file includes a plurality of features. The method: determines a plurality of feature groups, wherein each feature group includes n features and n is an integer of 2 or more; expresses each data file as a file vector, wherein each component of the vector indicates the frequency of a feature group within the data file, wherein the n features which constitute a feature group do not have to be located adjacent to one another; expresses a search query using the feature groups as a vector; and searches the plurality of data files by comparing the search query expressed as a vector with the file vectors.

Abstract: A system for calculating the look ahead probabilities at the nodes in a language model look ahead tree, wherein the words of the vocabulary of the language are located at the leaves of the tree, said apparatus comprising: means to assign a language model probability to each of the words of the vocabulary using a first low order language model; means to calculate the language look ahead probabilities for all nodes in said tree using said first language model; means to determine if the language model probability of one or more words of said vocabulary can be calculated using a higher order language model and updating said words with the higher order language model; and means to update the look ahead probability at only the nodes which are affected by the words where the language model has been updated.