Nuance Communications, Inc.

Madhavan S Thirumalai

Debajit Ghosh

Michael H Cohen

Steven Clive Ehrlich

Julian Sinai

Tracy D Wax

Peter C Monaco

Jennifer E Balogh

Mark Klenk

Sundeep Gupta

A voice-enabled application, which may be a voice browser, is configured to provide active help to a user. The application maintains a usage history of each user with respect to dialog states. The usage history includes various user-specific variables, some of which are valid across multiple sessions. The application maintains a number of active help prompts capable of being played to a user as speech, each containing information on a different, specific help topic. The application further maintains a number of sets of conditions, each set corresponding to a different one of the active help prompts. The application monitors dialog states during a session of a user and generates an event based on the dialog states. The application applies certain ones of the conditions to certain ones of the user-specific variables in response to the event. The application then plays a active help prompt containing information on a specific help topic to the user if the applied conditions are satisfied.

Method and apparatus for providing active help to a user of a voice-enabled application

A method and apparatus for creating modifiable and combinable Speech Objects for use in an interactive voice response (IVR) environment. Each Speech Object is for acquiring a particular type of information from a speaker during an interaction between the speaker and a speech recognition mechanism. A Speech Object is an instantiation of a user-extensible class that includes properties, such as prompts and grammars, associated with the corresponding type of interaction. A Speech Object further includes logic for controlling the interaction with the user when executed in a processing system. A Speech Object can be subclassed to add additional properties and functionality to create customized Speech Objects, or such properties can be altered at runtime. Multiple Speech Objects, each for acquiring a particular type of information, can be combined to form a compound Speech Object.

Method and apparatus for creating modifiable and combinable speech objects for acquiring information from a speaker in an interactive voice response system

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Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Madhavan S Thirumalai