Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Mark A Lawrence

Trausti Thor Kristjansson

Srivatsan Kandadai

Anna Chen Santos

Miroslav Ristic

Joseph Pedro Tavares

Valere Joseph Vanderschaegen

Balsa Laban

Miles Cohen

Adrian F Maxa

Thomas W Olsen

Robert I Brown

Jason Hartman

Kanwal VedBrat

Donald L Cantrell, Jr

Alexander Stevenson

Andrew M Precious

Chris Raubacher

Ben Constable

Steven Kiraly

Bilgem Cakir

Brett Bloomquist

Chris Kam Ming Chui

Samrach Tun

Thomas Mulcahy

Michael Dean Stokes

Gerhard A Schneider

Feng Yue

Benjamin C Constable

Christopher N Raubacher

Mikhail Lyapunov

Anthony John Rolls Hodsdon

Andrew Richard Simonds

Marilyn Chen

Anderson Quach

Niklas Erik Borson

Charles James Torbert

Shah Pavel Jamal

Timothy J Lytle

Kyle Daniel Halbach

Anthony Hodsdon

Louri Vladimirovitch Tarassov

Tomas Manuel Fernandez

Neal Peacock

A computer-implemented method includes receiving, at a microphone of a voice-controlled device, a speech input, generating an electrical signal having a first gain level that is below a gain threshold for audible detection by a user, transmitting the electrical signal to the speaker and detecting, by the microphone, an audio signal that includes a combination of ambient noise and a probe audio signal, wherein the probe audio signal is output by the speaker based on the electrical signal. The method further includes determining a power level of the probe audio signal and determining a state of the display based on the power level of the probe audio signal.

Detection of TV state using sub-audible signal

Devices, systems, and methods are provided for locally grouping voice-enabled device state communications. A device may determine first state information associated with the first device and send the first state information to a second device. The device may receive second state information associated with a second device and third state information associated with a third device. The device may receive an audible command, and may determine, based on the audible command, an indicator to send state data. The device may send the first state information, the second state information, the third state information, and data associated with the audible command. The device may receive fourth state information associated with the audible command.

Locally grouping voice-enabled device state communications

A computer-implemented method includes receiving, at a microphone of a voice-controlled device, a speech input from a user and determining, by the voice-controlled device, that a power state of an AV display device that is coupled to the voice-controlled device is an ON or OFF state. Based on the user intent determined from the speech input and the power state of the AV display, the voice-controlled device sends data to the AV display device to switch the AV display device ON or OFF. The method can further include receiving, by the voice-controlled device, content from a content source location and sending the content to the AV display device via an AV port.

Voice-controlled multimedia device

A system capable of generating and storing program data associated with localized content, such as over-the-air television broadcasts. The system may update a knowledge base with the program data to improve natural language understanding (NLU) processing associated with the localized content. For example, a voice enabled device may receive a voice command and the system may perform NLU processing to interpret the voice command, determine content based on the program data and send an instruction to an output device to output the content. The program data may include information about localized content such as channels detected by the output device and/or content broadcast on the channels, including information about an output device, a channel number, call sign, station name, signal strength, etc. associated with a detected channel, and/or a program name, genre, actors, directors, producers, etc. associated with content broadcast on the channel or stored in a local storage device.

Speech recognition for localized content

Methods and computer-readable media for displaying two-dimensional objects on a display device are disclosed. Rendering requests are received from an application to render two-dimensionally modeled graphics to a display device. Primitive geometries of drawing calls of the rendering requests are tessellated into sequences of triangles. The vertices of the triangles are mapped to a vertex buffer along with an index to identify associated constant data. Batching operations store and communicate calls and mapped data to a graphics processing unit by way of a three-dimensional rendering application program interface. Constant data associated with the mapped data are indexed and appended together in a constant buffer, thereby allowing drawing calls to be coalesced. A staging buffer and a staging texture are provided for batching text anti-aliasing operations. Shader fragments are precompiled and organized by way of a predetermined lookup table.

Leveraging graphics processors to optimize rendering 2-D objects

In a network facilitating print functions, a means for rendering a print job intended for a remote printer on a client computer using stored administrative settings is provided. Transparently to the client's applications, the client computer keeps the stored remote printer's administrative settings synchronized with those stored on the print server. Using the stored administrative settings, the client renders the print job to a native printer language directly cognizable by the printer before sending this rendered file to the print server for forwarding to the printer. By queuing these remote print jobs, the online status of the respective print server is also transparent to the client's applications, facilitating off-line printing.

Client side rendering of printable documents in a network

A system, a method and computer-readable media for rendering text with a graphics processing unit (GPU). The system, method, and media includes a GPU that may be configured to receive a plurality of compressed glyph bitmap and create a plurality of glyph textures from the bitmap. The GPU may be further configured to pack a plurality of rows of data from a glyph bitmap into a single row of a glyph texture. The GPU may be also be configured to merge the plurality of glyph textures into a merged texture to identify overlapping rows of color. Additionally, the GPU maybe configured to filter the merged texture to create a grayscale texture containing a plurality of merged glyphs and rendering the grayscale texture to display the plurality of merged glyphs.

Color packing glyph textures with a processor

A system data interface and related architectures are described. Various embodiments can provide one or more of the following capabilities: a generic data model, asynchronous client and server dispatch, cancellation, batching, transactional invocation, parallel invocation, interception or reflection. In one embodiment, the system data interface is employed in the context of a print system.

System data interfaces, related architectures, print system data interfaces and related print system architectures

The present invention is directed to a system and method of securely providing extensible third-party plug-ins to user computers. The system enables third-parties to authenticate themselves to user computers before a user computer is allowed to load the plug-ins. The system also creates separate processes that are spawned from a main process in order to securely execute the third-party plug-ins. Security is further enhanced by assigning a privilege level to the separate process that is lower than the main process.

Securely providing extensible third-party plug-ins

Printing systems and methods are described in which the priorities of print jobs are programmable. A scheduler component oversees print job management and scheduling, and works in concert with components called prioritizers, to provide for ease of programming and customization. In at least some embodiments, an interface to the system is provided to allow prioritizers to be programmed and inserted to customize the behavior of the scheduler according to different print job properties. In at least some embodiments, the system utilizes a model for the relative prioritization of print queues in the system to enforce a fair to balancing of system resources between print queues. In at least some embodiments, the system can independently schedule the rendering and printing operations when printing a job and can use a heuristic known as 'starvation risk' to help ensure that throttling rendering in the system does not result in device starvation.

Print job queuing and scheduling systems and methods

A method, medium, and computer-program product are provided to isolate (sandbox) printer drivers from other systems. A print processor and printer driver are moved into a separate process. A spooler communicates with the print processor through a shim, proxy, and stub. A component activation manager (CAM) maintains a database of the printer drives installed on a computer system. A component activation interface (CAI) facilitates startup and shutdown of the sandbox process.

Method and system for sandboxing printer drivers

Various distributed client side printing methods and systems are described. In at least some embodiments, printer control and the job handling functions are bifurcated or separated by allowing jobs, drivers, settings and the like to be controlled by the print server or some other entity, while allowing clients to communicate jobs directly to a printer. The various embodiments can improve server performance by performing rendering and maintaining rendered data on the client side, and not communicating the rendered data to the server, while at the same time, allowing print servers to control the printer.

Distributed client side printing methods and systems

Growing community of inventors

Kirkland, WA, United States of America

Mark A Lawrence