Apple Inc.

Ameya Y Joshi

Marc Albrecht

Tobias Jung

Richard Michael Powell

Sylvain J Choisel

Xiaokai Li

Sean C Chang

Ashrith Deshpande

Nachum M Kanovsky

Narimene Lezzoum

An appliance can include a microphone transducer, a processor, and a memory storing instructions. The appliance is configured to receive an audio signal at the microphone transducer and to detect an utterance in the audio signal. The appliance is further configured to classify a speech mode based on the utterance. The appliance is further configured to determine conditions of an environment of the appliance. The appliance is further configured to select at least one of a playback volume or a speech output mode from a plurality of speech output modes based on the classification, and the conditions of the environment of the appliance. The appliance is further configured to adapt the playback volume and/or mode of played-back speech according to the speech output mode. The appliance may be configured to synthesize speech according to the speech output mode, or to modify synthesized speech according to the speech output mode.

Environment aware voice-assistant devices, and related systems and methods

Systems, methods, and computer readable media to improve the operation of display systems are disclosed. In general, techniques are disclosed for dynamically adjusting backlight elements based on image content. More particularly, a backlight element's intensity may be targeted for boosting (i.e., increasing) based on content of the backlight element's corresponding image region, where after a check may be made to determine if the proposed increase is likely to risk generation of a halo. If the proposed intensity increase would risk a halo, the backlight element's proposed intensity may be dimmed. Repeating the boost/dim cycle in an iterative fashion permits an image to be displayed with brighter highlights and deeper blacks.

Locally adaptive backlight control

Aspects of the subject technology relate to display circuitry including pixel overdrive circuitry. The pixel overdrive circuitry includes a compression engine that compresses a previous display frame, for storage and comparison to a current display frame without compression or decompression of the current display frame. The compression engine compresses the previous frame in such a way that the maximum compression error is always known and can be used to determine whether to perform overdrive operations for the current frame without compressing and decompressing the current display frame. The compression engine selects gradient encoding or decimation encoding for the compression of the previous display frame and can perform successive decimation operations within the gradient encoding operations to help reduce the size of the compressed previous frame while maintaining the quality of the ultimate overdriven current frame.

Display pixel overdrive systems and methods

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Menlo Park, CA, United States of America

Ameya Y Joshi