Dale Boss

Retaining prosody during speech analysis for later playback

A speech system includes a speech encoding system and a speech decoding system. The speech encoding system includes a speech analyzer for identifying each of the speech segments (i.e., phonemes) in the received digitized speech signal. A pitch detector, a duration detector, and an amplitude detector are each coupled to the memory and the analyzer and detect various prosodic parameters of each received speech segment. A speech encoder generates a data signal that includes the speech segment IDs and the values of the corresponding prosodic parameters. The speech decoding system includes a digital data decoder and a speech synthesizer for generating a speech signal based on the segment IDs and prosodic parameter values.