Abstract: A method and apparatus is disclosed for remotely processing voice commands for controlling a television. A voice command is uttered by a user into a microphone contained in a remote control. The voice command is digitized, modulated, compressed, and wirelessly transmitted to a wireless receiver connected to a set-top box. The voice command is then transmitted to a cable head-end unit for voice and word recognition processing. Once the command function is determined, the function is transmitted back to the set-top box where the set-top box performs the command. The microphone is activated and deactivated by pressing and releasing a push-to-talk (PTT) switch. The PTT activates other functions by being turned, double-clicked and toggled up and down, left and right.

Abstract: Two statistics are disclosed for determining the quality of language models. These statistics are called acoustic perplexity and the synthetic acoustic word error rate (SAWER), and they depend upon methods for computing the acoustic confusability of words. It is possible to substitute models of acoustic data in place of real acoustic data in order to determine acoustic confusability. An evaluation model is created, a synthesizer model is created, and a matrix is determined from the evaluation and synthesizer models. Each of the evaluation and synthesizer models is a hidden Markov model. Once the matrix is determined, a confusability calculation may be performed. Different methods are used to determine synthetic likelihoods. The confusability may be normalized and smoothed and methods are disclosed that increase the speed of performing the matrix inversion and the confusability calculation. A method for caching and reusing computations for similar words is disclosed.

Abstract: A method and apparatus is disclosed for remotely processing voice commands for controlling a television. A voice command is uttered by a user into a microphone contained in a remote control. The voice command is digitized, modulated, compressed, and wirelessly transmitted to a wireless receiver connected to a set-top box. The voice command is then transmitted to a cable head-end unit for voice and word recognition processing. Once the command function is determined, the function is transmitted back to the set-top box where the set-top box performs the command. The microphone is activated and deactivated by pressing and releasing a push-to-talk (PTT) switch. The PTT activates other functions by being turned, double-clicked and toggled up and down, left and right.

Abstract: Two statistics are disclosed for determining the quality of language models. These statistics are called acoustic perplexity and the synthetic acoustic word error rate (SAWER), and they depend upon methods for computing the acoustic confusability of words. It is possible to substitute models of acoustic data in place of real acoustic data in order to determine acoustic confusability. An evaluation model is created, a synthesizer model is created, and a matrix is determined from the evaluation and synthesizer models. Each of the evaluation and synthesizer models is a hidden Markov model. Once the matrix is determined, a confusability calculation may be performed. Different methods are used to determine synthetic likelihoods. The confusability may be normalized and smoothed and methods are disclosed that increase the speed of performing the matrix inversion and the confusability calculation. A method for caching and reusing computations for similar words is disclosed.