Sony Corporation

Sony Electronics Inc

Other

Alexandra Nsonwu

Parichay Saxena

Sheng Dong

Kim Mingo

Murthy Atmakuri

Hanchang Kuo

A pop-up option palette for controlling electronic equipment such as a set top box. The pop-up option palette of the present invention is implemented as an overlay window enabled by HTML. The pop-up option palette appears anywhere on the system at the touch of a particular key on the remote control and disappears at the touch of the same key in the preferred embodiment. The pop-up option palette provides shortcut methods for jumping to other areas of the system, eliminating the need for actual toolbars or menus. When the pop-up key is activated, a window providing a palette of options appears overlaying the browser's main window. The content of the window can be determined based on the page being displayed so that appropriate information relevant to the page being displayed appears within the pop-up option palette window. Thus, the options available on the pop-up option palette are context sensitive. Additionally, help available through the help button is also context sensitive.

Pop-up option palette

A method of operation of a computer system for processing an arbitrary document such as a World Wide Web page to provide additional information not immediately available from the raw, unprocessed document. This additional information allows a user to navigate and control the content of the document using, in some embodiments, voice commands and/or an agent-based user interface. The present disclosure provides both a visual display of previously invisible links embedded in a web page image and an audible indication of the presence of such links. The present invention further comprises a scripting language that allows the rapid creation of executable computer instructions (or scripts) for controlling the behaviors and functionality of the agent-based interface. Such scripts enable the creation of a friendlier, easy to use interface to the navigation and control features. The present invention also comprises the ability to read the contents of an arbitrary web page aloud, including the names of embedded hypertext links, thus facilitating web surfing by the sightless.

Voice recognition for animated agent-based navigation

Icon for a portion of a display screen

Icon for a display screen

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Alexandra Nsonwu