Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Panasonic Technologies, Inc.

Matsushita Electric Corporation of America

Brian A Hanson

Robert C Boman

Roland Kuhn

Hector Raul Javkin

Elizabeth G Keate

Norma Antonanzas-Barroso

Jean-Claude Junqua

Luca Rigazio

Philippe Rene Morin

Nicholas Kibre

Stephen L Johnson

Steve D Pearson

Kazue Hata

Rathinavelu Chengalvarayan

Steven Pearson

Judson Hofmann

Ronald B Richard

Ranjun Zou

Paul Liao

The vehicular monitoring system obtains audio information from the speech of occupants within the vehicle and then processes that audio information to extract information about the behavior of the vehicle occupants. Using the behavioral information the system then assesses whether said behavior is in compliance with a predefined set of rules. Severe violations are reported to a third party via cellular telephone or other means. Less severe violations are recorded in a log file that is subsequently uploaded to a networked computer system for review and analysis. The behavioral rules used to assess violations may be modified by the administrative user.

Enhanced automotive monitoring system using sound

A device usage monitoring and control system for accomplishing parental monitoring and control of devices connected to a home network includes a permissions module receiving and storing control commands from a parent defining permissions with respect to one or more children. The permissions specify levels of access to devices connected to a home network and/or classifications of media content consumable via the devices. A control module grants a child access to the devices and/or media content via the devices based on the levels of access. A monitoring module monitors the child's usage of the devices and/or the child's consumption of media content via the devices, stores a related usage history, and communicates the usage history to the parent.

Method and parental control and monitoring of usage of devices connected to home network

A personal item monitoring system includes a monitor having a transmitter and a receiver located therein. At least one radio identification tag is adapted to be coupled to a personal item. Alternatively, the radio identification tag may be pre-installed into the personal item. The monitor emits a radio frequency received by the radio frequency identification tag, and the radio frequency identification tag emits a responding signal if within a detection range. The monitor then alerts a user if the radio identification tag leaves the range of detection.

Personal item monitor using radio frequency identification

System speakers are switched to function as sound input transducers to improve recognizer performance and to support recognizer features. A crossbar switch is selectively activated, either manually or under software control, to allow system loudspeakers to function as sound input transducers that supplement the recognition system microphone or microphone array. Using loudspeakers as 'microphones' improves speech recognition in noisy environments, thus attaining better recognition performance with little added system cost. The loudspeakers, positioned in physically separate locations also provide spatial information that can be used to determine the location of the person speaking and thereby offer different functionality for different persons. Acoustic models are selected based on environmental and vehicle operating conditions and may be adapted dynamically using ambient information obtained using the loudspeakers as sound input transducers.

Speech recognizer performance in car and home applications utilizing novel multiple microphone configurations

A new speaker provides speech from which comparison snippets are extracted. The comparison snippets are compared with initial snippets stored in a recorded snippet database that is associated with a concatenative synthesizer. The comparison of the snippets to the initial snippets produces required sound units. A greedy selection algorithm is performed with the required sound units for identifying the smallest subset of the input text that contains all of the text for the new speaker to read. The new speaker then reads the optimally selected text and sound units are extracted from the human speech such that the recorded snippet database is modified and the speech synthesized adopts the voice quality and characteristics of the new speaker.

Text selection and recording by feedback and adaptation for development of personalized text-to-speech systems

A multi-user e-mail reader system allows several users to access their e-mail accounts simultaneously and have the e-mail messages played back with speech synthesis. The user navigates through various functional states of the system using either touch-tone keypad commands or optionally voiced commands interpreted by a speech recognizer. Users can send reply e-mail messages without the use of a computer, by invoking the system's text processor. The text processor operates in conjunction with a keypad-to-ASCII conversion mechanism that allows fully punctuated and properly addressed e-mail messages to be composed from the touch-tone phone. Digital audio sound file attachments may be recorded through the telephone handset and attached to an outgoing e-mail message. A system for storing canned messages allows the user to quickly send pre-composed reply messages, either as stored or after editing using the text processor. The text processor uses a virtual cursor pointer that may be indexed forward and backward at different granularities, depending on whether the system is in play mode or record mode. The granularity can also be changed by the user.

Text-to-speech e-mail reader with multi-modal reply processor

An electronic news receiving device receives text data for an electronic edition of a newspaper in the evening and audibly reads the newspaper to the user the next day. The newsreader includes a receiver which receives an electronic edition of a newspaper transmitted by a transmitter at an electronic news preparer's facility. The news preparer may mark words that do not conform to conventional letter-to-sound rules with a pronunciation flag and provide pronunciation data for the words with the electronic edition of the newspaper. The data may be compressed by providing a dictionary in the news receiving device and, at the preparer's facility, translating each word into a dictionary address. The transmission channel may include a telephone line, the vertical blanking interval of a television signal, a cable television channel, an AM/FM subcarrier signal or a satellite channel. The received electronic edition of the newspaper is processed by a section filter to retain desired sections of the newspaper and to discard unwanted sections. The retained news articles are stored in memory. A text-to-speech converter produces an audible output corresponding to the spoken text of the news articles. A user can input one or more keywords to cause the device to selectively read articles containing the keywords. The text to speech converter of the device uses rules and a dictionary to provide syntactic and semantic prosody for morpheme reconstructions. The user may determine which articles are read and may vary the rate at which articles are read using manual controls or spoken commands.

Electronic news reception apparatus that selectively retains sections

This invention includes a speech training system that allows a student to enter any utterance to be learned and have the articulatory model movements required to produce the utterance displayed on a CRT screen. The system accepts a typed utterance, breaking it down into a set of speech units which could be phonemes or syllables and the onset and offset of the speech units. The set of speech units is sent to a synthesizer, which produces a set of parameters indicating the acoustic characteristics of the utterance. The acoustic parameters are converted into articulatory parameters emphasizing the frequency and nasality required to produce the typed utterance. The speech units and onset and offset of each are used to generate tongue-palate contact patterns required to produce the typed utterance. The articulatory parameters are displayed on the CRT screen. The acoustic parameters are also sent to a formant synthesizer which converts the parameters into speech output. The system measures a student's production and then evaluates the student's production against the parameters of the typed utterance for its similarity. Feedback on the similarity is displayed on the CRT screen.

Synthesis-based speech training system and method

This invention includes a speech training system that allows a student to enter any utterance to be learned and have the articulatory model movements required to produce the utterance displayed on a CRT screen. The system accepts a typed utterance, breaking it down into a set of phonemes. The set of phonemes is sent to a synthesizer, which produces a set of parameters indicating the acoustic characteristics of the utterance. The acoustic parameters are converted into articulatory parameters emphasizing the frequency, nasality, and tongue-palate contact required to produce the typed utterance. The articulatory parameters are displayed on the CRT screen. The acoustic parameters are also sent to a formant synthesizer which converts the parameters into speech output. The system measures a student's production and then evaluates the student's production against the parameters of the typed utterance for its similarity. Feedback on the similarity is displayed on the CRT screen.

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Goleta, CA, United States of America

Brian A Hanson