The filing, titled “Voice assignment for text-to-speech output,” looks to create “speaker profiles” which can change the voice characteristics of TTS output to match parsed-out metadata like age, sex, dialect and other variables.
As noted by the application, many systems exist today to aid the visually impaired, including the system on Apple’s iPhone, however most TTS engines “generate synthesized speech having voice characteristics of either a male speaker or a female speaker. Regardless of the gender of the speaker, the same voice is used for all text-to-speech conversion regardless of the source of the text being converted.” Apple’s invention proposes a different solution.
This is a great read, and a fascinating concept. I was very skeptical as I started reading this piece, but as I understood all the nuances of the invention, (pun intended), I found myself nodding. This could be an excellent advancement for TTS.
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