US Patent Issued to SOUL MACHINES on May 27 for "Real-time generation of speech animation" (New Zealander Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,315,054, issued on May 27, was assigned to SOUL MACHINES Ltd. (Auckland, New Zealand).

"Real-time generation of speech animation" was invented by Mark Sagar (Auckland, New Zealand), Tim Szu-Hsien Wu (Auckland Central, New Zealand), Xiani Tan (Auckland, New Zealand) and Xueyuan Zhang (Auckland, New Zealand).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "To realistically animate a String (such as a sentence) a hierarchical search algorithm is provided to search for stored examples (Animation Snippets) of sub-strings of the String, in decreasing order of sub-string length, and concatenate retrieved sub-strings to complete the String of speech animation. In ...