Patent Application
20210065692
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
The present invention relates to a system and method for extracting and using prosody features of a human voice, for the purpose of enhanced voice pattern recognition and the ability to output prosodic features to an end user application.
Our voice is so much than words; voice has intonations, intentions, patterns and this makes us truly unique in our communication. Unfortunately, all this is completely lost when we interact through today's speech recognition tools.
The term “Prosody” refers to the sound of syllables, words, phrases, and sentences produced by pitch variation in the human voice. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance (statement, question, or command); the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of language that may not be encoded by the grammar or choice of vocabulary. In terms of acoustics attributes, the prosody of oral languages involves variation in syllable length, loudness and pitch. In sign languages, prosody involves the rhythm, length, and tension of gestures, along with mouthing and facial expressions. Prosody is typically absent in writing, which can occasionally result in reader misunderstanding. Orthographic conventions to mark or substitute for prosody include punctuation (commas, exclamation marks, question marks, scare quotes, and ellipses), and typographic styling for emphasis (italic, bold, and underlined text).
Prosody features involve the magnitude, duration, and changing over time characteristics of the acoustic parameters of the spoken voice, such as: Tempo (fast or slow), timbre or harmonics (few or many), pitch level and in particular pitch variations (high or low), envelope (sharp or round), pitch contour (up or down), amplitude and amplitude variations (small or large), tonality mode (major or minor), and rhythmic or non rhythmic behavior.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,566,092 B2 discloses a method and apparatus for extracting a prosodic feature and applying the prosodic feature by combining with a traditional acoustic feature.
None of the previous inventions and patents, taken either singly or in combination, is seen to describe the instant invention as claimed. Hence, the inventor of the present invention proposes to resolve and surmount existent technical difficulties to eliminate the aforementioned shortcomings of prior art.
In light of the disadvantages of the prior art, the following summary is provided to facilitate an understanding of some of the innovative features unique to the present invention and is not intended to be a full description. A full appreciation of the various aspects of the invention can be gained by taking the entire specification, claims, and abstract as a whole.
The primary desirable object of the present invention is to provide a novel and improved way in which during voice-based interactions, the system listens to the intonation of the speakers and the way specific words are pronounced in order to attach a specific emotion to each tone.
It is another objective of the system which provides recommended actions to one side of the voice interaction that allows the 1st party to dictate and direct the flow of conversation to change or maintain the emotion being expressed.
It is further the objective of the invention to establish in this portion of the disclosure that the present invention is the system which provides 1st party with an easy-to-interpret visual representation of actions being suggested and then taken by 1st party.
It is also the objective of the invention that due to the content being analyzed by the system are language agnostic.
It is another objective of the invention is receiving speech data from the user, performing a prosodic analysis of the speech data, and controlling the virtual agent movement according to the prosodic analysis.
Being able to control the facial expressions and head movements automatically, without having to interpret the text or the situation, opens for the first time the possibility of creating photo-realistic animations automatically. For applications such as customer service, the visual impression of the animation has to be of high quality in order to please the customer. Many companies have tried to use visual text-to-speech in such applications, but failed because the quality was not sufficient.
This summary is provided merely for purposes of summarizing some example embodiments, so as to provide a basic understanding of some aspects of the subject matter described herein. Accordingly, it will be appreciated that the above-described features are merely examples and should not be construed to narrow the scope or spirit of the subject matter described herein in any way. Other features, aspects, and advantages of the subject matter described herein will become apparent from the following Detailed Description, and Claims.
Detailed descriptions of the preferred embodiment are provided herein. It is to be understood, however, that the present invention may be embodied in various forms. Therefore, specific details disclosed herein are not to be interpreted as limiting, but rather as a basis for the claims and as a representative basis for teaching one skilled in the art to employ the present invention in virtually any appropriately detailed system, structure or manner.
One aspect of the present application is directed to invent a voice-based interactions, the system listens to the intonation of the speakers and the way specific words are pronounced in order to attach a specific emotion to each tone.
Certain embodiments of the present invention seek to use a computerized enterprise's knowledge of the user and his problems in order to direct the conversation in a way that will meet their business goals and policies.
The system can be used in the various fields for variety of reasons such as:
An additional embodiment of the present invention is:
Another embodiment of the invention is short lexical expressions in conversational speech convey emotions by the speaker modifying the prosody of the utterance. It is thought that these are an unintentional kind of emotion and bring out a better result in terms of understanding the speaker as opposed to the more deliberate speech bursts
Depending on the implementation of the technology there may or may-not be a prescriptive element that tells the user what to do to move the emotion or sentiment. In some applications, the need for prescriptive actions is not needed as the technology is used as an interaction review tool.
Emotion detection is based on the prosodic elements of speech whereas prosody is concerned with those elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, tone, stress, and rhythm.
While a specific embodiment has been shown and described, many variations are possible. With time, additional features may be employed.
Having described the invention in detail, those skilled in the art will appreciate that modifications may be made to the invention without departing from its spirit. Therefore, it is not intended that the scope of the invention be limited to the specific embodiment illustrated and described. Rather, it is intended that the scope of this invention be determined by the appended claims and their equivalents.
The Abstract of the Disclosure is provided to allow the reader to quickly ascertain the nature of the technical disclosure. It is submitted with the understanding that it will not be used to interpret or limit the scope or meaning of the claims. In addition, in the foregoing Detailed Description, it can be seen that various features are grouped together in various embodiments for the purpose of streamlining the disclosure. This method of disclosure is not to be interpreted as reflecting an intention that the claimed embodiments require more features than are expressly recited in each claim. Rather, as the following claims reflect, inventive subject matter lies in less than all features of a single disclosed embodiment. Thus, the following claims are hereby incorporated into the Detailed Description, with each claim standing on its own as a separately claimed subject matter.
