US Patent Issued to Google on April 8 for "Attention-based clockwork hierarchical variational encoder" (British, American Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,272,349, issued on April 8, was assigned to Google LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).

"Attention-based clockwork hierarchical variational encoder" was invented by Robert Clark (Hertfordshire, Great Britain), Chun-An Chan (Mountain View, Calif.) and Vincent Wan (London).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for representing an intended prosody in synthesized speech includes receiving a text utterance having at least one word, and selecting an utterance embedding for the text utterance. Each word in the text utterance has at least one syllable and each syllable has at least one phoneme. The utterance embedding represents an intended prosody. Fo...