Speech synthesizing apparatus and method, and storage medium therefor

Abstract

A speech synthesizing apparatus for synthesizing a speech waveform stores speech data, which is obtained by adding attribute information onto phoneme data, in a database. In accordance with prescribed retrieval conditions, a phoneme retrieval unit retrieves phoneme data from the speech data that has been stored in the database and retains the retrieved results in a retrieved-result storage area. A processing unit for assigning a power penalty and a processing unit for assigning a phoneme-duration penalty assign the penalties, on the basis of power and phoneme duration constituting the attribute information, to a set of phoneme data stored in the retrieved-result storage area. A processing unit for determining typical phoneme data performs sorting on the basis of the assigned penalties and, based upon the stored results, selects phoneme data to be employed in the synthesis of a speech waveform.