Apple Adding Character-to-Text Feature to Devices, Patent Revealed

Apple Insider got its hands on an Apple patent that uses information from texts, emails and other forms of communications and then assigns a voice to fit the profile of the sender.

This means the device would take context cues of what its reading and alter its personality, or voice, accordingly.

"Many modern computing devices (e.g., personal computers, smart phones, electronic tablets, television systems) run applications that convert text to speech. This conversion allows a user to listen to messages received in text format through email, texting or other communication technology," the patent, filed by Jonathan Honeycutt, reads. "Such applications are especially useful to vision impaired users. Text-to-speech engines often generate synthesized speech having voice characteristics of either a male speaker or a female speaker. Regardless of the gender of the speaker, the same voice is used for all text-to-speech conversion regardless of the source of the text being converted. "

For instance, if the device is reading aloud an email it can identify as an older female living in the United Kingdom, then the voice will emulate the attributes represented by that female in accent and tone, according to Tech Crunch.

That patent is called "Voice assignment for text-to-speech output."

The patent says this feature would allow provide users "a more enjoyable and entertaining experience for the listener."

Apple Insider gives a more thorough example of how the process would work:

"An example is provided in which a user receives a message from "Charles Prince," who has an email address of charles.prince@isp.uk, regarding a party for "Albert." In this case, the system could use the ".uk" address as primary metadata. Secondary metadata can be gathered if a contact card is attached to the message, or if Charles Prince's information is already in the user's address book.

The data from the text and the corresponding metadata are then fed into a TTS engine, which assigns a speaker profile to convert the text into speech. 

After converting each word and phonetic transcription in the text to distinct sounds that comprise a given language, the TTS engine then divides and marks rhythmic sounds like phrases, clauses and sentences."

 Even more astonishing, the patent also said a speaker's voice could be put into the system and used for communications with that person.

Apple Insider said this doesn't mean Apple plans to pursue the project, but it could be revolutionary.