Apple Inc.

Mahesh Ramaray Shanbhag

Benjamin S Phipps

Eugene Ray

Xinyuan Huang

Bryan Hansen

Nikrouz Ghotbi

Jaireh Tecarro

Yifeng Gui

Sumit Wattal

Patrick L Coffman

Anumita Biswas

Zaka Ur Rehman Ashraf

Sachin S Kajarekar

Jared S Grubb

Gabriel Sanchez

Robert M Stewart

Kisun You

David J Chandler

Anshul Jain

Andrew Byrne

Minsub Lee

This relates to intelligent automated assistants and, more specifically, to intelligent context sharing and task performance among a collection of devices with intelligent automated assistant capabilities. An example method includes, at a first electronic device participating in a context-sharing group associated with a first location: receiving a user voice input; receiving, from a context collector, an aggregate context of the context-sharing group; providing at least a portion of the aggregate context and data corresponding to the user voice input to a remote device; receiving, from the remote device, a command to perform one or more tasks and a device identifier corresponding to a second electronic device; and transmitting the command to the second electronic device based on the device identifier, wherein the command causes the second electronic device to perform the one or more tasks.

Digital assistant hardware abstraction

Techniques are disclosed for coordinating interactions between a user device and a plurality of accessory devices. In one example, a user device receives information identifying one or more accessory devices in communication with the user device. The user device may implement accessory interaction instances for each of the identified accessories. A first accessory interaction instance can be associated with a first accessory among the identified accessories and receive a first audio input from the first accessory corresponding to a user request. The first accessory interaction instance can process a portion of the received audio input and receive a first response from a server computer. The user device may then transmit the first response to the first accessory device.

Techniques for communication between hub device and multiple endpoints

Systems and processes for operating an intercom system via a digital assistant are provided. The intercom system is trigger-free, in that users communicate, in real-time, via devices without employing a trigger to speak. Acoustic fingerprints are employed to associate users with devices. Acoustic fingerprints include vector embeddings of speech input in an acoustic-feature vector space. Speech heard at multiple devices, as embedded in a fingerprint, may be clustered in the vector space, and the structure of the clusters is employed to associate users and devices. Based on the fingerprints, a device is mapped to a user, and the user employs that device to participate in a conversation, via the intercom service.

Device arbitration for digital assistant-based intercom systems

Growing community of inventors

Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Mahesh Ramaray Shanbhag