US 12670918 B2 / Jun 30, 2026

Voice modification

A computing system that receives an audio waveform representing speech from an individual and produces as output a modified version of the audio waveform that maintains the speaker's speech characteristics as well as prosody for specific utterances (e.g., voice timbre, intonation, timing, intensity). The system uses a bottleneck-based autoencoder with speech spectrograms as input and output. To produce the output audio waveform, the system includes a reconstruction error-based loss function with two additional loss functions. The second loss function is speaker “real vs fake” discriminator that penalizes for the output not sounding like the speaker. The third loss function is a speech intelligibility scorer that penalizes the output for speech that is difficult for the target population to understand. The produced modified audio waveform is an enhanced speech output that delivers speech m a target accent without sacrificing the personality of the speaker.