Nuance Communications, Inc.

Nuance Corporation, Inc.

Solomon Z Lerner

Kenneth W D Smith

Caroline Drouin

Shimol Shah

Mark Fanty

Gerard Nantel

Embodiments disclosed herein enable scaling up and making advanced natural language (NLU) applications more robust. According to one embodiment, state(s) associated with a dialog session may be recorded to a non-transitory medium. The dialog session may be suspended after a given period of inactivity and later automatically awakened based on unique client, session, or device identifier, or any combination thereof. Memory and resources associated with the suspended session may be reclaimed, the memory and resources being otherwise held by the session during the period of inactivity, enabling higher density (e.g., a larger number of sessions supported). Embodiments disclosed herein obviate a need for sticky dialog sessions, enabling higher density, and may further failover protection and fault tolerance for the dialog sessions.

Method and apparatus for supporting scalable multi-modal dialog application sessions

A dialog system is accessed by a remote user and is typically configured to receive a natural language query from the user and return a natural language answer to the user. Dialog systems can be copied without authorization or can become an out-of-date version. A dialog system with a signature, referred to herein as a 'signed' dialog system, can indicate the signature without affecting usage by users who are unaware that the dialog system contains the signature. The signed dialog system can respond to input such that only the designer of the dialog system knows the signature is embedded in the dialog system. The response is a way to check the source or other characteristics of the dialog system. A designer of signed dialog systems can prove whether an unauthorized copy of the signed dialog system is used by a third party by using publically-available user interfaces.

Method and apparatus for responding to a query at a dialog system

An embodiment of the present invention includes a method for creating a dialog system that provides a framework for creating a multi-modal dialog application and includes a runtime application package (RAP) enabling runtime media grammars, prompts, classifiers, and so forth, to be separate from a multi-modal dialog application that utilizes the RAP. Embodiments disclosed herein enable newly trained runtime media supporting the multi-modal dialog application to be deployed with ease, and to do so while a dialog service is in operation. Embodiments disclosed herein enable the multi-modal dialog application to be created, deployed, and maintained in an easy and flexible manner, saving an end-user that may be providing the multi-modal dialog application to customers both time and cost.

Method and apparatus for supporting multi-modal dialog applications

Embodiments disclosed herein enable scaling up and making advanced natural language (NLU) applications more robust. According to one embodiment, state(s) associated with a dialog session may be recorded to a fixed medium. The dialog session may be suspended after a given period of inactivity and later automatically awakened based on unique client, session, or device identifier, or any combination thereof. Memory and resources associated with the suspended session may be reclaimed, the memory and resources being otherwise held by the session during the period of inactivity, enabling higher density (e.g., a larger number of sessions supported). Embodiments disclosed herein obviate a need for sticky dialog sessions, enabling higher density, and may further failover protection and fault tolerance for the dialog sessions.

In one embodiment, a method comprises classifying a representation of audio data of a dialog turn in a dialog system to a classification. The method may further comprise taking a security action on the classified representation of the audio data of the dialog turn as a function of the classification. The security action can be suppressing the representation of the audio data, encrypting the representation of the audio data, releasing the representation of the audio data, partially suppressing the representation of the audio data, partially encrypting the representation of the audio data, partially releasing the representation of the audio data, or a command.

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Sharon, MA, United States of America

Solomon Z Lerner