Disclosed is a device which generates sound in selected waveforms and at selected frequencies via a transducer located in the mouth for conversion into intelligible speech by a person who has lost the use of the larynx or vocal cords. The device impulses the diaphragm of the transducer with pulses of generally rectangular waveform to provide the generated sound with a waveform comprising a series of damped sinusoids with harmonics. Such waveforms enable use of the device with practically any ind...

An electro-acoustic speech training device and a speech training method for use with persons having speech impediments. The device is provided with a transducer for converting a subject's speech into voice electrical signals. The output of the transducer is amplified by a preamplifier and filtered selectively by a therapist. The filtering is accomplished by one of two high pass filters which serves to attenuate the low frequencies of the voice electrical signals. One of the filters is fixed and ...

A method and system of speech compression by baseband vocal regeneration wherein a baseband signal including the first formant, approximately between 300 and 700 Hz, is transmitted to a receiver and supplied to a signal combining network along with a second formant regenerated from the baseband signal to provide a reconstructed speech signal including the first and second formants. An unvoice or fricative parameter can be transmitted along with the baseband signal and utilized at the receiver to...

Apparatus for indicating and teaching proper tongue and mouth formation to correct various speech problems is disclosed. The apparatus includes means for capturing a substantial portion of the air from the mouth of an individual while speaking. The capture means isolates the air expelled from different parts of the mouth, and means are provided for visually indicating the magnitude of air expelled from each part of the mouth. The individual can achieve proper tongue and mouth formation through t...

The present invention relates to speech synthesis system wherein the acoustic message items are optically stored. The system according to the invention comprises: an optical store including a plurality of diffractive elements pertaining to the holographic technique. Each element is constructed for selectively projecting images carrying acoustic information in optical form; each projected image being coverted into electrical speech signals through an image converter tube associated with a loudspe...

A helium speech decoder of the type that may be used to an advantage by drs living, working, and communicating in and from deep water habitats is disclosed as including a microphone, a digital-to-analog converter, a battery of pairs of shift registers, a like battery of select gate circuits, an analog-to-digital converter, and earphones. A programmable generator produces a plurality of control signals which are timely supplied to the aforementioned components as necessary to effect the concerted...

An improved speech compressor provides frequency transformation by passing speech signals through an analog shift register and controlling the shift rate of the register with a linearly varying periodicity with noise cancellation of the characteristic noise in the shift registers and the control of the sample period and output blanking to improve the signal output characteristic and minimize noise components therein. The system provides a single compression-expansion manual control which varies ...

A language processing portion (31) analyzes a text from a dialogue processing section (20) and transforms the text to information on pronunciation and accent. A prosody generation portion (32) generates an intonation pattern according to a control signal from the dialogue processing section (20). A waveform DB (34) stores prerecorded waveform data together with pitch mark data imparted thereto. A waveform cutting portion (33) cuts desired pitch waveforms from the waveform DB (34). A phase operat...

An expressive speech-to-speech generation system and method which can generate expressive speech output by using expressive parameters extracted from the original speech signal to drive the standard TTS system. The system comprises: speech recognition means, machine translation means, text-to-speech generation means, expressive parameter detection means for extracting expressive parameters from the speech of language A, and expressive parameter mapping means for mapping the expressive parameters...

A speech decoder comprises a decoder (103) for converting a linear prediction encoded speech signal into a first sample stream having a first sampling rate and representing a first frequency band. Additionally it comprises a vocoder (105) for converting an input signal into a second sample stream having a second sampling rate and representing a second frequency band, and combination means (107) for combining the first and second sample streams in processed form. It comprises also means (301) for...