DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 1-9 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Arik et al. (PGPUB 2018/0247636), hereinafter referenced as Arik.
Regarding claim 1, Arik discloses a method of speech synthesis for an audio signal, the method comprising:
receiving audio parameters of the audio signal and a representation of the audio signal (fig. 1, element 105, 135, 140 with spectral or excitation parameters; p. 0031);
inputting the audio parameters of the audio signal and the representation of the audio signal into a generative model (generative model), wherein the generative model is trained to generate a synthesized representation of the audio signal based on the audio parameters and the representation of the audio signal (fig. 1 with p. 0058-0061, 0092-0100 with wavenet audio synthesis); and
outputting, by the generative model, the synthesized representation of the audio signal (final synthesized utterances; p. 0041-0042).
Regarding claims 2 and 8, Arik discloses a method wherein the audio signal comprises 16 kHz audio (p. 0095).
Regarding claims 3 and 7, Arik discloses a method wherein the generative model is configured to operate autoregressively (p. 0025, 0059, 0100, 0166).
Regarding claims 4 and 9, Arik discloses a method wherein the generative model comprises a generative adversarial network (p. 0128).
Regarding claim 5, Arik discloses a method further comprising quantizing at least one of the representation of the audio signal or the audio parameters of the audio signal (quantize; p. 0128, 0135).
Regarding claim 6, it interpreted and rejected for similar reasons as set forth above. In addition, Arik discloses a system for generating a synthesized representation of an audio signal, the system comprising:
a generative model (p. 0092, 0128 and 0163) comprising:
a layer configured to use a tanh activation (p. 0173); and
a convolutional layer (p. 0048-0060).
Conclusion
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/JAKIEDA R JACKSON/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2657
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