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API to break voice into phonemes / synthesize new speech given speech samples?

Asked 2011-08-11T01:57:33.687
18

You know those movies where the tech geeks record someone's voice, and their software breaks it into phonemes? Which they can then use to type in any phrase, and make it seem as if the target is saying it?

Does that software exist in an API Version? I don't even know what to Google.

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2 Answers

14

There is no such software. Breaking arbitrary speech into its constituent phonemes is only a partially solved problem: speech-to-text software is still imperfect, as is text-to-speech.

The idea is to reproduce the timbre of the target's voice. Even if you were able to segment the audio perfectly, reordering the phonemes would produce audio with unnatural cadence and intonation, not to mention splicing artifacts. At that point you're getting into smoothing, time-scaling, and pitch correction, all of which are possible and well-understood in theory, but operate poorly on real-world data, especially when the audio sample in question is as short as a single phoneme, and further when the timbre needs to be preserved.

These problems are compounded on the phonetic side by allophonic variation in sounds based on accent and surrounding phonemes; in order to faithfully produce even a low-quality approximation of the audio, you'd need a detailed understanding of the target's language, accent, and speech patterns.

Furthermore, your ultimate problem is one of social engineering, and people are not easy to fool when it comes to the voices of people they know. Even with a large corpus of input data, at best you could get a short low-quality sample, hardly enough for a conversation.

So while it's certainly possible, it's difficult; even if it existed, it wouldn't always be good enough.

answered 2011-08-11T02:14:12.817
1

You can get interesting voice warping effects with a formant-aware pitch shift. Adobe Audition has a pretty good implementation. Antares produces some interesting vocal effects VST plugins.

These techniques use some form of linear predictive coding (LPC) to treat the voice as a source-filter model. LPC works on speech signals by estimating the resonance of the vocal tract (formant), reversing its effect with an inverse filter, and then coding the resulting residual signal. The residual signal is ideally an impulse train that represents the glottal impulse. This allows the scaling of pitch and formants independently, which leads to a much better gender conversion result than simple pitch shifting.

answered 2011-08-13T20:41:57.863

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