Comverse, Inc.

Lawrence A Denenberg

Christopher M Schmandt

Erin M Panttaja

C Steven Briggs

Corine A Bickley

A method for providing a bookmark in a voice application includes presenting the voice application to a user, allowing the user to access the voice application and provide vocal input to the voice application, creating, upon a user request, a bookmark to a location in the voice application in accordance with vocal input provided to the voice application, and providing the user with access to the bookmark in the voice application in order to return to the bookmarked location.

Method and system for providing a voice application bookmark

Predicting speech recognizer confusion where utterances can be represented by any combination of text form and audio file. The utterances are represented with an intermediate representation that directly reflects the acoustic characteristics of the utterances. Text representations of the utterances can be directly used for predicting confusability without access to audio file examples of the utterances. First embodiment: two text utterances are represented with strings of phonemes and one of the strings of phonemes is transformed into the other strings of phonemes for a least cost as a confusability measure. Second embodiment: two utterances are represented with an intermediate representation of sequences of acoustic events based on phonetic capabilities of speakers obtained from acoustic signals of the utterances and the acoustic events are compared. Predicting confusability of the utterances according to a formula 2K/(T), K is a number of matched acoustic events and T is a total number of acoustic events.

Method of assessing degree of acoustic confusability, and system therefor

An interactive voice response system is able to respond to questions from users on general topics by including words related to those topics in the grammar of a speech recognition system. Words that are added for all users are obtained from current news reports obtained from news providers accessible via the Internet, or a similar source. In addition, information is stored in an information database about places or people that may be of interest to users, such as weather reports and forecasts for many cities. The grammar of the speech recognition system is modified for an individual user to enable the system to recognize questions relating to, e.g., the weather in one of the cities, only when the system detects that the user has accessed a file containing a word included in the information database. The file may be a message, calendar or address book.

Automatic dynamic speech recognition vocabulary based on external sources of information

The present invention is a system that uses a limited text input entry device to narrow the possibilities for the selection of a phonetically based name used in a voice dialer. The user enters a DTMF signature of a name using only one key for each letter of the name. The signature is used by a dictionary to generate likely possibilities for the word. The user is asked whether the name is the name entered via playing the name to the user. If the user confirms the choice, the phonetic representation is stored along with a corresponding telephone number. If the played word does not match, a word generator generates additional likely possibilities from the signature. A speech recognizer picks the best representation from the dictionary and generator words based on a spoken version of the name. A first name and last name procedure, in which the first and last name signatures produce separate candidate lists, is used to provide an entry to an address book for voice dialing.

Growing community of inventors

Brookline, MA, United States of America

Lawrence A Denenberg