Gm Global Technolgoy Operations, Inc.

Xufang Zhao

Gaurav Talwar

Eli Tzirkel-Hancock

John L Holdren

Md Foezur Rahman Chowdhury

Rathinavelu Chengalvarayan

Ron M Hecht

John J Correia

Uma Arun

Omer Tsimhoni

Frank C Valeri

Scott M Reilly

Eray Yasan

Kevin R Krause

Dipankar Pal

Robert D Sims, Iii

Michael A Wuergler

Greg T Lindemann

A system and method of recognizing speech in a vehicle. The method includes receiving a voice command at the vehicle via a microphone in the vehicle, and obtaining a recognition result from speech recognition performed on the received voice command. The recognition result may represent the voice command and be indicative of any of two or more available vehicle commands. The method may further include selecting one of the two or more available vehicle commands based on a secondary characteristic and an attribute of the selected one of the vehicle commands. The system may be implemented as vehicle electronics that include a microphone located within the vehicle and configured to receive a voice command from a user located within the vehicle, and a controller in communication with the microphone. The controller may be configured to perform speech recognition on the voice command and obtain a disambiguated recognition result.

Disambiguation of vehicle speech commands

A system and method of processing disfluent speech at an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system includes: receiving speech from a speaker via a microphone; determining the received speech includes disfluent speech; accessing a disfluent speech grammar or acoustic model in response to the determination; and processing the received speech using the disfluent speech grammar.

Automatic speech recognition for disfluent speech

A system and method of adjusting digital audio sampling used with wideband audio includes: performing audio sampling on an analog audio signal at an initial sampling rate and an initial bit rate over a wideband audio frequency range; generating a digital audio signal based on the audio sampling; detecting a qualitative error rate between the analog audio signal and the digital audio signal; and decreasing the initial sampling rate, the initial bit rate, or both for sampling subsequent analog audio when the qualitative error is below a threshold.

Adjusting audio sampling used with wideband audio

A method of choosing a nametag using automatic speech recognition (ASR) includes: receiving a spoken nametag via a microphone; performing a first speech recognition analysis on the spoken nametag; determining that the first speech recognition analysis outputs only handheld wireless device nametags; performing a second speech recognition analysis that excludes the handheld wireless device nametags stored at the handheld wireless device; and combining the results of the first speech recognition analysis and the second speech recognition analysis.

In-vehicle nametag choice using speech recognition

A system and method of recognizing speech received at a vehicle includes: receiving speech from a vehicle occupant via a microphone; determining whether the speech relates to a point of interest (POI) or an address without receiving a POI command prompt or an address command prompt in the speech from the vehicle occupant; selecting a POI function or an address function based on the determination; and processing the received speech to identify a POI or an address.

Recognizing address and point of interest speech received at a vehicle

A system and method of performing automatic speech recognition (ASR) includes: receiving speech at a vehicle microphone; communicating the received speech to an ASR system; measuring an amount of time that elapses while speech is received; selecting a point-of-interest (POI) context or an address context based on the measured amount of received time; and processing the received speech using a POI context-based grammar when a POI context is selected or an address-based grammar when an address context is selected.

Streamlined navigational speech recognition

A system and method of tuning speech recognition systems includes performing text-to-speech conversion of text data; detecting the accuracy of speech converted from text data; determining that the detected accuracy is below a predetermined threshold; recording a user recitation of the text data in response to the determination; and storing the user recitation in an exception database located at a vehicle.

Dynamic speech system tuning

A method of recognizing continuous digits uttered by a speaker using an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system includes receiving continuous digits via a microphone as speech from a user; detecting that recognition of one or more of the continuous digits falls below a predetermined confidence threshold; prompting the user to identify the continuous digits using a body gesture; detecting the body gesture made by the user; and identifying one or more of the continuous digits based on the body gesture.

Gesture-based cues for an automatic speech recognition system

A method of processing audio received at a plurality of microphones in a vehicle includes receiving the audio as a first audio stream and second audio stream at respective first and second microphones that are positioned at different locations within the vehicle; creating a first digital time series and a second digital time series that represent the first audio stream and the second audio stream, respectively; calculating a delay that exists between the first audio stream and the second audio stream based on a cross-correlation of the first digital time series and the second digital time series; and processing the received audio using the calculated delay.

Processing of audio received at a plurality of microphones within a vehicle

A method is disclosed that provides text-to-speech (TTS) functionality to a telematics unit of a telematics-equipped vehicle. The method includes: receiving text content to be played back by an audio system of the telematics-equipped vehicle; determining, by a processor, a TTS rendering process to be used for the text content from a plurality of TTS rendering processes, wherein the plurality of TTS rendering processes include local TTS rendering using a local TTS engine at the telematics-equipped vehicle and remote TTS rendering using a remote TTS engine at a communications center; and causing, by the processor, the text content to be rendered as an audio signal for playback by the telematics-equipped vehicle using the determined TTS rendering process.

Text-to-speech processing based on network quality

A hands-free audio system for a vehicle and method of using the system is described. The method includes controlling the directionality of a vehicle microphone. The steps of the method may include: (a) receiving a sensor value from at least one of a vehicle seat position sensor, a vehicle seat orientation sensor, or a vehicle mirror orientation sensor; (b) based on the received sensor value(s) of step (a), determining an origin of a vehicle user's speech; and (c) controlling the microphone sensitivity directionality based on the determined origin.

Directional control of a vehicle microphone

A method of speech synthesis including receiving a text input sent by a sender, processing the text input responsive to at least one distinguishing characteristic of the sender to produce synthesized speech that is representative of a voice of the sender, and communicating the synthesized speech to a recipient user of the system.

Sender-responsive text-to-speech processing

A system and method of controlling an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system includes: receiving speech at the ASR system from a vehicle occupant that includes a command to control a vehicle function; identifying a gate command from the speech; associating the identified gate command with the command to control the vehicle function; storing the associated gate command and vehicle command in a database; receiving additional speech at the ASR system from the vehicle occupant; detecting the gate command in the additional speech; and accessing the stored gate command and vehicle command from the database.

Speech recognition using a database and dynamic gate commands

A method of automated speech recognition in a vehicle. The method includes receiving audio in the vehicle, pre-processing the received audio to generate acoustic feature vectors, decoding the generated acoustic feature vectors to produce at least one speech hypothesis, and post-processing the at least one speech hypothesis using pitch to improve speech recognition accuracy. The speech hypothesis can be accepted as recognized speech during post-processing if pitch is present in the received audio. Alternatively, a pitch count for the received audio can be determined, N-best speech hypotheses can be post-processed by comparing the pitch count to syllable counts associated with the speech hypotheses, and the speech hypothesis having a syllable count equal to the pitch count can be accepted as recognized speech.

Using pitch during speech recognition post-processing to improve recognition accuracy

A system and method of regulating automatic speech recognition (ASR) playback of audible prompts includes: generating an audible prompt via a speaker; detecting ambient sound during the audible prompt via a microphone; obtaining a speech recognition confidence value for speech recognition performed on the ambient sound; and reducing a volume level of the audible prompt based on the speech recognition confidence value while continuing to generate the audible prompt.

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Windsor, CA, United States of America

Xufang Zhao