“The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple a new patent for a text-to-speech conversion process,” Electronista reports.
“Titled Multi-unit approach to text-to-speech synthesis, the patent describes a way of matching units from an input string to an audio library. An important inclusion is metadata, such as articulation relationships, which can inform a processor how to make phrases sound more natural,” Electronista reports. “The software should also support a client-server architecture, allowing remote processing.”
Electronista reports, “The patent could indicate that Apple eventually wants to rely on its own text-to-speech technology, rather than use licensed code from Nuance.”
Read more in the full article here.