{
  "patent_number": "US 11062694",
  "country": "US",
  "title": "Making Computer Voices Sound More Expressive from Your Speech",
  "original_title": "Text-to-speech processing with emphasized output audio",
  "summary": "This patent describes how a computer listens to your spoken words, figures out which parts you emphasized, and then makes its own computer-generated voice emphasize those same parts when it speaks back.",
  "what_it_does": "This patent describes a method for generating computer speech that mimics the emphasis from a user's original spoken input. First, the system receives input audio data representing speech and uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to convert it into text, referred to as \"input data\" (Claim 1). Then, it analyzes the input audio to determine \"paralinguistic feature data\" (Claim 1), which includes characteristics like pitch, volume, or duration of specific words. This paralinguistic data is used to identify which parts of the text should be emphasized. For example, if a user says \"I *really* want coffee,\" the system detects the emphasis on \"really.\" The system then prepares \"output data\" (Claim 1), potentially by adding a Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) tag (Claim 4) to the emphasized portion. Finally, Text-to-Speech (TTS) processing is performed on this output data, generating speech where the identified portion, like \"really,\" is spoken with corresponding emphasis (Claim 2), making the computer's response sound more natural.",
  "what_it_does_not_cover": [
    "Does not cover text-to-speech emphasis based solely on linguistic rules or grammar without analyzing the user's original spoken input for paralinguistic features.",
    "Does not cover systems that only transcribe speech to text without generating new, emphasized speech output.",
    "Does not cover emphasizing computer-generated speech based purely on pre-written text where no input audio was analyzed for emphasis cues.",
    "Does not cover systems where emphasis is determined solely by user preferences or profile data without considering the paralinguistic features of the current input audio.",
    "Does not cover emphasis derived from non-audio inputs, such as visual cues or typed instructions, without corresponding analysis of spoken audio."
  ],
  "filed": "2019-06-07",
  "granted": "2021-07-13",
  "expires": "2039-06-07",
  "status": "active",
  "holder": "Amazon Technologies",
  "holder_url": "https://patentbrief.org/company/amazon-technologies",
  "inventors": [
    {
      "name": "Marco Nicolis",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/marco-nicolis"
    },
    {
      "name": "Adam Franciszek Nadolski",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/adam-franciszek-nadolski"
    }
  ],
  "times_cited": 3,
  "tags": [
    "consumer_electronics",
    "software",
    "telecommunications",
    "ai_ml"
  ],
  "abstract": "Systems and methods for generating output audio with emphasized portions are described. Spoken audio is obtained and undergoes speech processing (e.g., ASR and optionally NLU) to create text. It may be determined that the resulting text includes a portion that should be emphasized (e.g., an interjection) using at least one of knowledge of an application run on a device that captured the spoken audio, prosodic analysis, and/or linguistic analysis. The portion of text to be emphasized may be tagged (e.g., using a Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) tag). TTS processing is then performed on the tagged text to create output audio including an emphasized portion corresponding to the tagged portion of the text.",
  "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11062694/text-to-speech-processing-with-emphasized-output-audio",
  "markdown_url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11062694/text-to-speech-processing-with-emphasized-output-audio/md",
  "google_patents_url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US11062694",
  "relatedPatents": [
    {
      "patentNumber": "10276149",
      "countryCode": "US",
      "title": "How Voice Assistants Change Their Speech Based on How You Talk",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/10276149/dynamic-text-to-speech-output"
    },
    {
      "patentNumber": "11514901",
      "countryCode": "US",
      "title": "How Voice Assistants Recognize Who is Talking",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11514901/anchored-speech-detection-and-speech-recognition"
    },
    {
      "patentNumber": "9548050",
      "countryCode": "US",
      "title": "How a Digital Assistant Launches Apps Using Your Voice",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/9548050/continuity-handoff"
    },
    {
      "patentNumber": "11361763",
      "countryCode": "US",
      "title": "How Smart Speakers Know You're Talking to Them After a Command",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11361763/detecting-system-directed-speech"
    },
    {
      "patentNumber": "11645473",
      "countryCode": "US",
      "title": "How AI Predicts Who Will Speak Next in a Conversation",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11645473/palm-pathways-language-model"
    }
  ]
}