Speech Systems, Inc.

Lucent Technologies Inc.

William Stuart Meisel

David L Basore

W Andreas Wittenstein

A voice activated device using speaker independent speech recognition is capable of receiving from a remote location the phonetic spellings needed for speech recognition in the device. The phonetic spellings, as well as additional application data, are communicated to the voice activated device from the remote location and stored in the device. A user can then speak voice commands which are intercepted by the device where local processing of the voice commands takes place. The device makes available to the user extensive information pertaining to multiple network services or applications. The information may be communicated to the user by voice or via other communication media.

Voice activated device and method for providing access to remotely

The present invention processes an independent body of speech during an enrollment process and creates a set of speaker specific enrollment parameters for normalizing analysis parameters including the speaker's pitch, the frequency spectrum of the speech as a function of time, and certain measurements of the speech signal in the time-domain. A particular objective of the invention is to make these analysis parameters have the same meaning from speaker to speaker. Thus after the pre-processing performed by this invention, the parameters would look much the same for the same word independent of speaker. In this manner, variations in the speech signal caused by the physical makeup of a speaker's throat, mouth, lips, teeth, and nasal cavity would be, at least in part, reduced by the pre-processing.

Preprocessing system for speech recognition

A plurality of microphones are disposed on a body to detect the speech of a speaker. First, second and third microphones may respectively detect the sounds emanating from the speaker's mouth, nose and throat and produce signals representing such sounds. A fourth microphone may detect the fricative and plosive sounds emanating from the speaker's mouth and produce signals representing such sounds. The signals from the different microphones are compared to allow the discrimination of certain speech sounds. For example, a high amplitude of the signal from the nose microphone relative to that from the mouth microphone indicates that a nasal sound such as m, n, or ng was spoken. Identifying signals are provided to the speech recognition system to aid in identifying the speech sounds at each instance. The identifying signals can also select a microphone whose signal can be passed on to the recognition system in its entirety. Signals may also be provided to identify that spoken words such as 'paragraph' or 'comma' are actually directions controlling the form, rather than the content, of the speech by the speaker. The selected signals, the identifying or classifying signals and the signals representing directions may be recovered by the system of this invention. The selected and identifying signals may be processed to detect syllables of speech and the syllables may be classified into phrases or sentences. The result may then be converted to a printed form representing the speech or utilized in the operation of another device.

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Encino, CA, United States of America

William Stuart Meisel