Nuance Communications, Inc.

Peter C Monaco

Steven Clive Ehrlich

Matthew Lennig

Julian Sinai

Debajit Ghosh

David Bruce Peters

Madhavan S Thirumalai

Thomas Murray Kuhn

Mark Klenk

Sundeep Gupta

A graphical tool is provided for allowing a developer of a speech-enabled application to create and edit grammars for speech recognition. The tool provides a user interface that has two editing modes, which the user can quickly and easily switch between. In the first editing mode, the user can specifying a grammar by writing or editing a Grammar Specification Language (GSL) listing. In response to such user inputs, the tool automatically generates or modifies a set of displayable graphical objects representing the grammar. In the second editing mode, the displayable objects are displayed, such that each object represents one or more speech expressions, and the logical relationships between the expressions are graphically represented. The user may edit the set of displayed objects in the second editing mode, including adding or deleting objects, modifying an expression represented by an object, or altering the logical relationships between the expressions. User inputs directed to the objects in the second editing mode are automatically reflected in the GSL listing when the user switches back to the first editing mode.

Creating and editing grammars for speech recognition graphically

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

A system and method for efficiently distributing voice call data received from speech recognition servers over a telephone network having a shared processing resource is disclosed. Incoming calls are received from phone lines and assigned grammar types by speech recognition servers. A request for processing the voice call data is sent to a resource manager which monitors the shared processing resource and identifies a preferred processor within the shared resource. The resource manager sends an instruction to the speech recognition server to send the voice call data to a preferred processor for processing. The preferred processor is determined by known processor efficiencies for voice call data having the assigned grammar type of the incoming voice call data and a measure of processor loads. While the system is operating, the resource manger develops and updates a history of each processor. The histories include processing efficiency values for all grammar types received. The processing efficiencies are stored, tabulated and assigned usage number values for each processor. When incoming voice call data is receive, the resource manages evaluates the total sum of the usage numbers for processing requests assigned to each processor and the usage number for the grammar type of the incoming data as applied to each processor. The incoming data is distributed to the processor with the lowest sum of total of usage numbers for assigned requests and the usage number assigned to the incoming data for that processor.

System architecture for and method of voice processing

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Mt. View, CA, United States of America

Peter C Monaco