Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Tellme Networks, Inc.

Myspace, LLC

Hadi Partovi

Angus Macdonald Davis

Roderick Steven Brathwaite

Brandon William Porter

John Giannandrea

Eckart Walther

Michael S McCue

Matthew T Marx

Eugene Koh

Lisa Joy Stifelman

David Bryan Alpert

Anthony Accardi

Zhe Li

Srivatsan Parthasarathy

Benjamin W Slivka

Scott James Bailey

Jeff C Kunins

Haleh Partovi

Kyle D Sims

Darby McDonough Bailey

James Robert Everingham

Nathaniel S Brown

Daphne Huetu Luong

Julian Jiggins

Yevgeny Zarakhovsky

Steven J Freedman

Patrick McCormick

Charles E Kindel, Jr

Andrew Clarke

Tom Thai

Daniel Joseph Howard

Ali Partovi

Raymond Edward Endres

James E Allard

David J D'Souza

Eric Robert Berman

Stephen Proteau

Bharat Shyam

Erik Jon Snapper

Erik Castedo Ellerman

Clint C Jorgenson

Leonard J Peterson

Charles E Kindel

E Castedo Ellerman

Frank Z Chang

Benjamin Botts Osheroff

Firooz Partovi

Jeremy Belldina

Barry Arons

Andy Scott

Angus MacDonald

Ross B Fubini

Michael M Plitkins

A system, apparatus, and method for processing or correcting metadata used to characterize content such as images, video, books, or music, where that metadata may be provided by a community of users or other source. The metadata may be searched as part of a process of identifying and accessing content of interest to a user or of sharing content among users of a network. The metadata is typically a string or strings of characters that is submitted by a community, so that the accuracy of specific data cannot be guaranteed and consistent formats and unambiguous descriptions may not be used by all members of the community.

System, apparatus and method for determining correct metadata from community-submitted data

A zero-footprint remotely hosted phone application development environment is described. The environment allows a developer to use a standard computer without any specialized software (in some embodiments all that is necessary is a web browser and network access) together with a telephone to develop sophisticated phone applications that use speech recognition and/or touch tone inputs to perform tasks, access web-based information, and/or perform commercial transactions. For example, in preparation for a sales pitch for selling hosting services, a non-programmer can develop a short application appropriate to the target customer. After the pitch, access to the demonstration could be given to the target customer to allow them to more fully develop the application. When the target customer is satisfied with the application, they can have their application live for their actual (as opposed to test users) at a suitable phone number simply by having the hosting provider configure the appropriate access. Once the source code of phone application is identified to the development environment, the developer can use a telephone to immediately call the application on the hosted development environment. Some embodiments support concurrent call flow tracking that allows a developer to observe, using a web browser, the execution of her/his application. A variety of reusable libraries are provided to enable the developer to leverage well-developed libraries for common playback, input, and computational tasks. This focuses the development on application specific logic. Embodiments of the invention simplify the process of defining speech recognition grammars within their applications. Embodiments of the invention support rapid application deployment from the development environment to hosted application deployment to the intended audience.

Zero-footprint telephone application development

A system, apparatus, and method to assist in the discovery of music or other content by members of a social network. The present invention permits network members to network together and share information about their music collections and listening habits with a processing platform and with each other. The processing platform processes music library content and playback related data to produce similarity and compatibility measures between artists (that is, an artist-to-artist measure) and between network members (that is, a network member-to-network member measure). By combining the content and playback related data with filtering mechanisms, recommendation techniques (which may be based on the calculated measures), and set membership concepts, the present invention provides network members of the network with tools to discover artists and/or songs that are likely to be of interest to them.

System, apparatus and method for discovery of music within a social network

A method of accessing and updating an electronic phonebook over electronic communications networks such as a telephone and computer networks is described. The creation of a voice portal is supported by the invention. Embodiments of the invention use telephone identifying information such as the calling party's number to identify, or create, user profiles for customization. The user profile can include personalized phonebook entries that include names and telephone numbers of relevance to the user. Additionally, the voice portal can connect the user to numbers contained in the personalized phonebook in response to spoken commands. The profile can also be updated with additional phonebook entries over the interne using a web browser.

Updating an electronic phonebook over electronic communication networks

Methods and systems automatically download computer software components from a computer network like the Internet or an intranet. The methods and systems can be used to provide dynamic or interactive multimedia components in HTML documents with HTML &#x3c;OBJECT&#x3e; tags. The HTML &#x3c;OBJECT&#x3e; tags can contain parameters including uniform resource locators (URLs) which reference dynamic or interactive multimedia components on remote computers. Network browsers and other applications can obtain computer software components from a computer network like the Internet or an intranet in a uniform, portable, architecture-neutral, robust manner. The computer software components obtained can be used to provide a variety of new multimedia functionality to an application program.

Automatic software downloading from a computer network

A method and apparatus for providing personalized information content over telephones is described. The creation of a voice portal is supported by the invention. Embodiments of the invention use telephone identifying information such as the calling party's number to identify, or create, user profiles for customization. The personalized content is specific to that user based on her/his telephone identifying information and may be further customized based on the current time, current date, the calling party's locales, and/or the calling party's dialect and speech patterns. In some embodiments, the dialect is selected from a range of common American English dialects according to the locale of the calling party. For example, callers from the Northern Midland will automatically hear a Northern Midland dialect, while callers from the Coastal Southeast will hear that dialect, etc. Individuals can change the dialect to better suit their personal tastes.

Content personalization over an interface with adaptive voice character

A method and system for providing efficient menu services for an information processing system that uses a telephone or other form of audio user interface. In one embodiment, the menu services provide effective support for novice users by providing a full listing of available keywords and rotating house advertisements which inform novice users of potential features and information. For experienced users, cues are rendered so that at any time the user can say a desired keyword to invoke the corresponding application. The menu is flat to facilitate its usage. Full keyword listings are rendered after the user is given a brief cue to say a keyword. Service messages rotate words and word prosody. When listening to receive information from the user, after the user has been cued, soft background music or other audible signals are rendered to inform the user that a response may now be spoken to the service. Other embodiments determine default cities, on which to report information, based on characteristics of the caller or based on cities that were previously selected by the caller. Other embodiments provide speech concatenation processes that have co-articulation and real-time subject-matter-based word selection which generate human sounding speech. Other embodiments reduce the occurrences of falsely triggered barge-ins during content delivery by only allowing interruption for certain special words. Other embodiments offer special services and modes for calls having voice recognition trouble. The special services are entered after predetermined criterion have been met by the call. Other embodiments provide special mechanisms for automatically recovering the address of a caller.

Providing menu and other services for an information processing system using a telephone or other audio interface

This invention relates in general to methods for receiving and interpreting an alphanumeric input string entered on a telephone keypad using one keystroke per input string character. The set of matching objects in a database are selected and sorted and presented to the user as an ordered list from which the user may select the desired item on the list through a further numeric keystroke entry or through a spoken selection that is matched against a restricted voice recognition grammar for improved recognition accuracy. In an alternative embodiment, the matching objects in the database are selected and sorted and the response associated with each matched object is presented in sorted sequence.

Voice and telephone keypad based data entry for interacting with voice information services

A voice portal supporting telephone to web server commerce is described. The voice portal allows users to access web servers using a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), optionally including the use of a secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol, to complete commercial transactions. Additionally, embodiments of the invention can employ a one word commerce model that abstracts the particular model used by various electronic commerce vendors' web sites. The one word commerce model permits a user to identify a product and signal her/his purchase intentions with a single word, phrase, or touch-tone command. The voice portal can then complete the transaction supplying the electronic commerce vendor necessary information about the purchaser, e.g., her/his address, telephone number, electronic mail address, credit card information, etc. As needed, the voice portal can prompt the purchaser for information.

Method and apparatus for electronic commerce using a telephone interface

A method and apparatus for providing personalized information content over telephones is described. The creation of a voice portal is supported by the invention. Embodiments of the invention use telephone identifying information such as the calling party's number to identify, or create, user profiles for customization. The personalized content is specific to that user based on her/his telephone identifying information and may be further customized based on the current time, current date, the calling party's locales, and/or the calling party's dialect and speech patterns. Also, the telephone identifying information may support targeted advertising, content, and purchasing recommendations specific to that user. The system may use a voice password and/or touch-tone login system when appropriate to distinguish the caller or verify the caller's identity for specific activities. Typically, embodiments of the invention will immediately present a caller personalized content based on her/his profile using the appropriate dialect as well as the caller's preferred content. Profiles can be constructed as the caller uses embodiments of the invention as well as through explicit designation of preferences. For example, the user might specify an existing personalized site to use in building her/his profile. Additionally, new callers may have an initial profile generated based on one or more database lookups for demographic information based on their telephone identifying information.

System for providing personalized content over a telephone interface to a user according to the corresponding personalization profile including the record of user actions or the record of user behavior

Providing services for an information processing system using an audio interface

A system and method is provided for learning data values over time as they are entered by a user on a form such as a web page form. An Internet web browser can be modified to suggest previously used data values for any form field that is the same as or similar to a previously used form field. Application programs that use the web browser can gain access to previously used form field values even if they have no knowledge of the field names. Software in a web browser associates field names across different Universal Resource Locators (URLs), so that when a user enters a value into a field (e.g., username) at a first web site, that same value can be automatically suggested when the user displays a different form on a different web site that uses the same field name.

System and method for populating forms with previously used data values

A zero-footprint remotely hosted phone application development environment is described. The environment allows a developer to use a standard computer without any specialized software (in some embodiments all that is necessary is a web browser and network access) together with a telephone to develop sophisticated phone applications that use speech recognition and/or touch tone inputs to perform tasks, access web-based information, and/or perform commercial transactions. Some embodiments support concurrent call flow tracking that allows a developer to observe, using a web browser, the execution of her/his application. A variety of reusable libraries are provided to enable the developer to leverage well-developed libraries for common playback, input, and computational tasks. Embodiments support rapid application deployment from the development environment to hosted application deployment to the intended audience.

Method and apparatus for zero-footprint phone application development

A method and apparatus for linking a web based account to a phone based account is described. The method avoids the need to directly reveal account information, e.g. username/password, about one account to the provider of the other. The linking occurs on the web in one embodiment, with a user's browser being redirected from the web site to the web site of the provider of the voice service. The redirection URL will include account linking information. Once the user identifies herself to the web site of the provider of the voice service, the linking information can be stored in the user's phone account as a cookie. When the user access the voice service over the phone, her telephone identifying information can be used to identify her profile. When she visits the phone application corresponding to the web site, the cookie&#x2014;now including linking information&#x2014;can be passed to the application to identify the appropriate web account.

Web-to-phone account linking using a linking code for account identification

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San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Hadi Partovi