Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Meta Platforms Technologies, LLC

Facebook Technologies, LLC

Tony David

Jacobi Colton Grillo

Kavitha Velusamy

Timothy Theodore List

Philip Ryan Hilmes

Michael Alan Pogue

Albert M Scalise

Preethi Narayanan

David Wilson Poole

Wei Ey Li

Isabella Talley Lewis

Faiza Hassan

Jeffrey Penrod Adams

Hugh Evan Secker-Walker

Stan Weidner Salvador

Kenneth John Basye

Reinhard Kneser

Mahesh Krishnamoorthy

Parag Kumar Garg

Sebastian Sztuk

Sam Sarmast

Albert John Yu Sam Chua

Duane Everard Whyte

Christopher Mann Chamberlin

Chia Hung Kuo

Jacob William Beatty

Brian P Kennedy

Adrian Roy Ramiscal Santos

Saara Khan

Fletcher Nelson

Staci Elaan

Andrew Lovitt

Edward Dietz Crump

Nikko Strom

Wei Li

Gregg Elliott Zehr

Scott Ian Blanksteen

Tina Yung-Ting Chen

A voice interaction architecture has a hands-free, electronic voice controlled assistant that permits users to verbally request information from cloud services. The voice controlled assistant may be positioned in a room to receive voice commands from the user. The voice controlled assistant may also pick up background sources of speech, music, or other noise, such as from a television or stereo system, which may adversely impact the user's intended vocal input to the assistant. The assistant transmits the aggregated audio data (user command and background noise) over a network to the cloud services, which implements noise cancellation functionality to remove the background noise while isolating and preserving the user's command. Once isolated, the cloud serves can process and interpret the user input to perform some function, and return the response over the network to the voice controlled assistant for audible output to the user.

Voice interaction architecture with intelligent background noise cancellation

A distributed voice controlled system has a primary assistant and at least one secondary assistant. The primary assistant has a housing to hold one or more microphones, one or more speakers, and various computing components. The secondary assistant is similar in structure, but is void of speakers. The voice controlled assistants perform transactions and other functions primarily based on verbal interactions with a user. The assistants within the system are coordinated and synchronized to perform acoustic echo cancellation, selection of a best audio input from among the assistants, and distributed processing.

Voice controlled system

Voice-controlled devices that include one or more speakers for outputting audio. In some instances, the device includes at least one speaker within a cylindrical housing, with the speaker aimed or pointed away from a microphone coupled to the housing. For instance, if the microphone resides at or near the top of the cylindrical housing, then the speaker may point downwards along the longitudinal axis of the housing and away from the microphone. By pointing the speaker away from the microphone, the microphone will receive less sound from the speaker than if the speaker were pointed toward the microphone). Because the voice-controlled device may perform speech recognition on audio signals generated by the microphone, less sound from the speaker represented in the audio signal may result in more accurate speech recognition, and/or a lesser need to perform acoustic echo cancelation (AEC) on the generated audio signals.

Audio assemblies for electronic devices

Audio content may be played on multiple audio-enabled devices via a voice command issued by a user. The voice command is received at a first audio-enabled device and processed, via speech recognition, to identify the audio content to be played and the target devices on which the audio content is to be played. In addition, the voice command can also indicate the time periods associated with the audio playback to provide synchronized playback. Device set information can be used to determine if the first audio-enabled device shares audio functionality with the target devices. If shared functionality is confirmed, one or more commands are sent to the respective target devices to instruct the corresponding playback of the audio content.

Playback of audio content on multiple devices

A case for a head-mounted device includes a body portion and a power supply. The body portion includes one or more walls defining an interior cavity that is configured to receive and house the head-mounted device. The power supply is included in the body portion for transferring power to the head-mounted device.

Case for head-mounted device

The disclosed electronic shutter may include (1) an optical structure including a medium through which light from an environment passes to a lens of a camera for capturing an image of the environment; and (2) a controlling circuit that (a) detects a first condition of a signal, where the first condition indicates an activation of the camera, (b) controls, in response, to the first condition, the optical structure such that the medium attains a transparent optical state, (c) detects a second condition of the signal, where the second condition indicates a deactivation of the camera, and (d) controls, in response to the second condition, the optical structure such that the medium attains a non-transparent optical state in a manner that prevents visual detection of the lens from the environment. Various other methods and systems are also disclosed.

Electronic shutter for concealing and revealing a camera

An audio system that includes an IMU or accelerometer in physical proximity to a microphone and a driver. The signal generated by the IMU or accelerometer may be used to filter the audio signal generated by the microphone with respect to mechanically coupling between the driver outputting sound and the microphone via a shared structure. In some cases, an accelerometer may be incorporated into a package of the microphone to provide analog-based filtering prior to converting the audio signal of the microphone to a digital format.

System for filtering mechanical coupling from a microphone signal

Power consumption for a computing device may be managed by one or more keywords. For example, if an audio input obtained by the computing device includes a keyword, a network interface module and/or an application processing module of the computing device may be activated. The audio input may then be transmitted via the network interface module to a remote computing device, such as a speech recognition server. Alternately, the computing device may be provided with a speech recognition engine configured to process the audio input for on-device speech recognition.

Speech recognition power management

Devices that include light assemblies for providing visual feedback to users that operate the electronic devices. In some instances, the devices comprise voice-controlled devices and, therefore, include one or more microphones for receiving audible commands from the users. After receiving a command, for instance, one such voice-controlled device may cause a corresponding light assembly of the device to illuminate in some predefined manner. This illumination may indicate to the user that device has received the command. In other instances, the devices may illuminate the lighting assembly for an array of other purposes. For instance, one such device may illuminate the corresponding light assembly when powering on or off, playing music, outputting information to a user (e.g., via a speaker or display), or the like.

Light assemblies for electronic devices

A voice interaction architecture has a hands-free, electronic voice controlled assistant that permits users to verbally request information from cloud services. Since the assistant relies primarily, if not exclusively, on voice interactions, configuring the assistant for the first time may pose a challenge, particularly to a novice user who is unfamiliar with network settings (such as wife access keys). The architecture supports several approaches to configuring the voice controlled assistant that may be accomplished without much or any user input, thereby promoting a positive out-of-box experience for the user. More particularly, these approaches involve use of audible or optical signals to configure the voice controlled assistant.

Configuration of voice controlled assistant

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Tony David