Patents Examined by David Kovacek
  • Patent number: 8554544
    Abstract: Incoming e-mails, instant messages, SMS, and MMS, are scanned for new language objects such as words, abbreviations, text shortcuts and, in appropriate languages, ideograms, that are placed in a list for use by a text input process of a handheld electronic device to facilitate the generation of text. Systems and methods consistent with the present invention may gather new language objects from sources of text external to the handheld electronic device, and may ignore new language objects that are not considered to be in a current language of the handheld electronic device.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 12, 2009
    Date of Patent: October 8, 2013
    Assignee: BlackBerry Limited
    Inventors: Vadim Fux, Sergey Kolomiets
  • Patent number: 8548804
    Abstract: This invention relates to generation of a sample error coefficient suitable for use in an audio signal quality assessment system. The invention provides a method of determining a sample error coefficient between a first signal and a similar second signal comprising the steps of: determining a first periodicity measure from the first signal; determining a second periodicity measure from the second signal; generating a ratio in dependence upon said first periodicity measure and said second periodicity measure; and determining a sampling rate error coefficient in dependence upon said ratio.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 19, 2007
    Date of Patent: October 1, 2013
    Assignee: Psytechnics Limited
    Inventors: Paul Barrett, Ludovic Maifait
  • Patent number: 8532999
    Abstract: An apparatus and a method for generating a multi-channel synthesizer control signal, a multi-channel synthesizer, a method of generating an output signal from an input signal and a machine-readable storage medium are provided. On an encoder-side, a multi-channel input signal is analyzed for obtaining smoothing control information, which is to be used by a decoder-side multi-channel synthesis for smoothing quantized transmitted parameters or values derived from the quantized transmitted parameters for providing an improved subjective audio quality in particular for slowly moving point sources and rapidly moving point sources having tonal material such as fast moving sinusoids.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 13, 2011
    Date of Patent: September 10, 2013
    Assignees: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Angewandten Forschung E.V., Dolby International AB, Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.
    Inventors: Matthias Neusinger, Juergen Herre, Sascha Disch, Heiko Purnhagen, Kristofer Kjoerling, Jonas Engdegard, Jeroen Breebaart, Erik Schuijers, Werner Oomen
  • Patent number: 8510106
    Abstract: The present invention provides a method of eliminating background noise and a device using the same. The method of eliminating background noise comprises the steps of: detecting an effective value of a received audio signal, and generating an average power signal of the received audio signal; generating a noise eliminating control signal by comparing the average power signal with a first threshold; and eliminating the noise, and amplifying the voice signal using the noise eliminating control signal. A device of eliminating background noise comprises a detecting unit, which is configured to detect an effective value, and generate an average power signal of the received audio signal; a first signal generating unit, which is configured to generate a noise eliminating control signal; and an amplifying unit, which is configured to eliminate the noise, and amplify the voice signal.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 5, 2009
    Date of Patent: August 13, 2013
    Assignee: BYD Company Ltd.
    Inventors: Hai Li, Kunping Xu, Lizhen Zhang, Yun Yang, Wei Feng
  • Patent number: 8473299
    Abstract: A dialog manager and spoken dialog service having a dialog manager generated according to a method comprising selecting a top level flow controller based on application type, selecting available reusable subdialogs for each application part, developing a subdialog for each application part not having an available subdialog and testing and deploying the spoken dialog service using the selected top level flow controller, selected reusable subdialogs and developed subdialogs. The dialog manager capable of handling context shifts in a spoken dialog with a user. Application dependencies are established in the top level flow controller thus enabling the subdialogs to be reusable and to be capable of managing context shifts and mixed initiative dialogs.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 29, 2008
    Date of Patent: June 25, 2013
    Assignee: AT&T Intellectual Property I, L.P.
    Inventors: Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio, Charles Alfred Lewis
  • Patent number: 8473279
    Abstract: A method of stemming text and system therefore are described. The method comprises removing stop words from a document based on at least one stop word entry in an array of stop words and flagging as nouns words determined to be attached to definite articles and preceded by a noun array entry in an array of stop words preceding at least one noun; adding flagged nouns to a noun dictionary; flagging as verbs words determined to be preceded by an verb array entry in an array of stop words preceding at least one verb; adding flagged verbs to a verb dictionary; searching the document for nouns and verbs based on the flagged nouns and the flagged verbs; removing remaining stop words subsequent to searching the document; applying light stemming on the flagged nouns; applying a root-based stemming on the flagged verbs; and storing the stemmed document.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 1, 2009
    Date of Patent: June 25, 2013
    Inventor: Eiman Tamah Al-Shammari
  • Patent number: 8457965
    Abstract: A method is described for correcting and improving the functioning of certain devices for the diagnosis and treatment of speech that dynamically measure the functioning of the velum in the control of nasality during speech. The correction method uses an estimate of the vowel frequency spectrum to greatly reduce the variation of nasalance with the vowel being spoken, so as to result in a corrected value of nasalance that reflects with greater accuracy the degree of velar opening. Correction is also described for reducing the effect on nasalance values of energy from the oral and nasal channels crossing over into the other channel because of imperfect acoustic separation.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 6, 2009
    Date of Patent: June 4, 2013
    Assignee: Rothenberg Enterprises
    Inventor: Martin Rothenberg
  • Patent number: 8457948
    Abstract: A content generation service is described that generates content for electronic documents in different languages based upon templates. The templates may include paragraph templates composed of sentence types including sentence templates. The sentence templates may further include variables having corresponding attributes. Each of the paragraph templates, sentence templates, and attributes may be hierarchically organized. The content generation service may obtain data describing an item of interest, such as a travel item. The obtained data may further specify a document language, section and paragraph for which content is to be generated. Content is generated for variables in hierarchical order, with higher ranked paragraphs considered first. Within the highest ranked paragraph, a sentence type is selected and the variables within the highest ranked sentence template of the sentence type are considered.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 13, 2010
    Date of Patent: June 4, 2013
    Assignee: Expedia, Inc.
    Inventors: Rene Waksberg, Donny Hsu, Patrick Bradley
  • Patent number: 8447605
    Abstract: A game apparatus includes a CPU core for creating an input envelope and a registered envelope. The input envelope has a plurality of envelope values detected from a voice waveform input in real time through a microphone. The registered envelope has a plurality of envelope values detected from a voice waveform previously input. Both of the input envelope and the registered envelope are stored in a RAM. The CPU core evaluates difference of the envelope values between the input envelope and the registered envelope. When an evaluated value satisfies a condition, the CPU core executes a process according to a command assigned to the registered envelope.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 3, 2005
    Date of Patent: May 21, 2013
    Assignee: Nintendo Co., Ltd.
    Inventor: Yoji Inagaki
  • Patent number: 8364492
    Abstract: Disclosed is an apparatus including an unvoiced speech input device, a decision unit and an alarm unit. The unvoiced speech input device receives the unvoiced speech, and the decision unit determines whether or not a signal received from the unvoiced speech input device is an ordinary speech. The alarm unit receives a result of the decision from the decision unit to give an alarm when the result of decision indicates the ordinary speech. The alarm is given to a wearer of the apparatus if he/she has made ordinary speech.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 6, 2007
    Date of Patent: January 29, 2013
    Assignee: NEC Corporation
    Inventor: Reishi Kondou
  • Patent number: 8352256
    Abstract: An audio input signal is filtered using an adaptive filter to generate a prediction output signal with reduced noise, wherein the filter is implemented using a plurality of coefficients to generate a plurality of prediction errors and to generate an error from the plurality of prediction errors, wherein the absolute values of the coefficients are continuously reduced by a plurality of reduction parameters.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 30, 2010
    Date of Patent: January 8, 2013
    Assignee: Entropic Communications, Inc.
    Inventor: Joern Fischer
  • Patent number: 8352263
    Abstract: The invention can recognize all languages and input words. It needs m unknown voices to represent m categories of known words with similar pronunciations. Words can be pronounced in any languages, dialects or accents. Each will be classified into one of m categories represented by its most similar unknown voice. When user pronounces a word, the invention finds its F most similar unknown voices. All words in F categories represented by F unknown voices will be arranged according to their pronunciation similarity and alphabetic letters. The pronounced word should be among the top words. Since we only find the F most similar unknown voices from m (=500) unknown voices and since the same word can be classified into several categories, our recognition method is stable for all users and can fast and accurately recognize all languages (English, Chinese and etc.) and input much more words without using samples.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 29, 2009
    Date of Patent: January 8, 2013
    Inventors: Tze-Fen Li, Tai-Jan Lee Li, Shih-Tzung Li, Shih-Hon Li, Li-Chuan Liao
  • Patent number: 8346541
    Abstract: A method for constructing a Chinese dictionary is disclosed, including determining a probability for nominalization of a Chinese term with a given collocation term according to a determination rule and the correlation between the Chinese term and its corresponding collocations, wherein the Chinese term is determined to be a verb part-of-speech. The method further includes modifying the verb part-of-speech of the Chinese term with the given collocation term to an appropriate part-of-speech when the probability for nominalization of the Chinese term with the given collocation term is higher than a predetermined value, and storing the correlation between the Chinese term, the given collocation term and the appropriate part-of-speech in a storage device.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 1, 2009
    Date of Patent: January 1, 2013
    Assignee: Institute for Information Industry
    Inventors: Wen-Nan Wang, Jason S. Chang, Wen-Tai Hsieh, Tsun Ku, Chien-Cheng Wu, Yu-Ru Chen
  • Patent number: 8332216
    Abstract: A method for stereo audio perceptual encoding of an input signal includes masking threshold estimation and bit allocation. The masking threshold estimation and bit allocation are performed once every two encoding processes. Another method for stereo audio perceptual encoding of an input signal includes performing a time-to-frequency transformation, performing a quantization, performing a bitstream formatting to produce an output stream, and performing a psychoacoustics analysis. The psychoacoustics analysis includes masking threshold estimation on a first of every two successive frames of the input signal.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 22, 2006
    Date of Patent: December 11, 2012
    Assignee: STMicroelectronics Asia Pacific PTE., Ltd.
    Inventors: Evelyn Kurniawati, Sapna George
  • Patent number: 8315876
    Abstract: A headset includes a voice print match application or speech recognition application. The voice print match application receives a user speech corresponding to a submitted voice print phrase key upon determining a donned condition, where the user speech is compared to the predetermined voice print phrase key to validate an identity of the headset user. The speech recognition application receives a user speech corresponding to a password or PIN and recognizes the password or PIN. The recognized password or PIN is compared to a valid password or PIN to validate the identity of the headset user.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 9, 2008
    Date of Patent: November 20, 2012
    Assignee: Plantronics, Inc.
    Inventor: Edward Lester Reuss
  • Patent number: 8285546
    Abstract: A system for use in speech recognition includes an acoustic module accessing a plurality of distinct-language acoustic models, each based upon a different language; a lexicon module accessing at least one lexicon model; and a speech recognition output module. The speech recognition output module generates a first speech recognition output using a first model combination that combines one of the plurality of distinct-language acoustic models with the at least one lexicon model. In response to a threshold determination, the speech recognition output module generates a second speech recognition output using a second model combination that combines a different one of the plurality of distinct-language acoustic models with the at least one distinct-language lexicon model.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 9, 2011
    Date of Patent: October 9, 2012
    Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc.
    Inventor: David E. Reich
  • Patent number: 8271262
    Abstract: The invention comprises a lip reading device having a capacitive array for enhanced portable speech recognition. The capacitive array of the invention produces a sequence of signal frames or signal data sets (i.e., digitized output) representative of the proximity and motion of a user's lips at a predetermined sample rate and resolution. The sequence of signal data sets is stored in a first electronic memory and are compared against a reference data set representative of a predetermined acoustic signal stored in a second electronic memory. The attributes of signal data set are compared against the reference data set for likely data matches based on predetermined criteria.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 22, 2009
    Date of Patent: September 18, 2012
    Assignee: ISC8 Inc.
    Inventors: Ying Hsu, Virgilio Villacorta, W. Eric Boyd
  • Patent number: 8239190
    Abstract: A method of communicating speech comprising time-warping a residual low band speech signal to an expanded or compressed version of the residual low band speech signal, time-warping a high band speech signal to an expanded or compressed version of the high band speech signal, and merging the time-warped low band and high band speech signals to give an entire time-warped speech signal. In the low band, the residual low band speech signal is synthesized after time-warping of the residual low band signal while in the high band, an unwarped high band signal is synthesized before time-warping of the high band speech signal. The method may further comprise classifying speech segments and encoding the speech segments. The encoding of the speech segments may be one of code-excited linear prediction, noise-excited linear prediction or ? frame (silence) coding.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 22, 2006
    Date of Patent: August 7, 2012
    Assignee: QUALCOMM Incorporated
    Inventors: Rohit Kapoor, Serafin Diaz Spindola
  • Patent number: 8234116
    Abstract: Measurement of Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) between hidden Markov models (HMM) of acoustic units utilizes an unscented transform to approximate KLD between Gaussian mixtures. Dynamic programming equalizes the number of states between HMMs having a different number of states, while the total KLD of the HMMs is obtained by summing individual KLDs calculated by state pair by state pair comparisons.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 22, 2006
    Date of Patent: July 31, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Peng Liu, Frank Kao-Ping K. Soong, Jian-Lai Zhou
  • Patent number: 8219386
    Abstract: The Arabic poetry meter identification system and method produces coded Al-Khalyli transcriptions of Arabic poetry. The meters (Wazn, Awzan being forms of the Arabic poems units Bayt, Abyate) are identified. A spoken or written poem is accepted as input. A coded transcription of the poetry pattern forms is produced from input processing. The system identifies and distinguishes between proper spoken poetic meter and improper poetic meter. Error in the poem meters (Bahr, Buhur) and the ending rhyme pattern, “Qafiya” are detected and verified. The system accepts user selection of a desired poem meter and then interactively aids the user in the composition of poetry in the selected meter, suggesting alternative words and word groups that follow the desired poem pattern and dactyl components. The system can be in a stand-alone device or integrated with other computing devices.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 21, 2009
    Date of Patent: July 10, 2012
    Assignee: King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
    Inventors: Al-Zahrani Abdul Kareem Saleh, Moustafa Elshafei