Apple Inc.

Other

Yoon Kim

David A Carson

Thomas R Gruber

Rohit Dasari

William F Stasior

Justin G Binder

Charles Srisuwananukorn

Sachin S Kajarekar

John Bridle

Patrick L Coffman

David Chance Graham

Cyrus Daniel Irani

Joshua D Atkins

Aimee Piercy

Mehrez Souden

Feipeng Li

Sachin S Kajakekar

Systems and processes for operating an intelligent automated assistant to provide extension of digital assistant services are provided. An example method includes, at an electronic device having one or more processors, receiving, from a first user, a first speech input representing a user request. The method further includes obtaining an identity of the first user; and in accordance with the user identity, providing a representation of the user request to at least one of a second electronic device or a third electronic device. The method further includes receiving, based on a determination of whether the second electronic device or the third electronic device, or both, is to provide the response to the first electronic device, the response to the user request from the second electronic device or the third electronic device. The method further includes providing a representation of the response to the first user.

Far-field extension of digital assistant services for providing a notification of an event to a user

An optical recognition based positioning method and a positioning system, which can replace or compensate conventional satellite-based GPS, is provided. A position is determined utilizing a digital image, which captured a set of optical marks of known geographic coordinates. The distances in pixel coordinates of the optical marks within the digital image are converted into an angle at the camera between the actual geographical coordinate of the optical marks. A first group of points having the same angle as the first and second optical marks are identified. A second group of points having the same angle as the second and third optical marks are identified. Also, a third group of points having the same angle as the first and third optical marks are identified. Then, a point that co-exist in the first, second and the third group is identified as the geographical location of the positioning module.

Optical self positioning system and method thereof

An electronic device can implement a zero-latency digital assistant by capturing audio input from a microphone and using a first processor to write audio data representing the captured audio input to a memory buffer. In response to detecting a user input while capturing the audio input, the device can determine whether the user input meets a predetermined criteria. If the user input meets the criteria, the device can use a second processor to identify and execute a task based on at least a portion of the contents of the memory buffer.

Zero latency digital assistant

Systems and processes for operating an intelligent automated assistant are provided. In accordance with one example, a method includes, at an electronic device with one or more processors, memory, and a plurality of microphones, sampling, at each of the plurality of microphones of the electronic device, an audio signal to obtain a plurality of audio signals; processing the plurality of audio signals to obtain a plurality of audio streams; and determining, based on the plurality of audio streams, whether any of the plurality of audio signals corresponds to a spoken trigger. The method further includes, in accordance with a determination that the plurality of audio signals corresponds to the spoken trigger, initiating a session of the digital assistant; and in accordance with a determination that the plurality of audio signals does not correspond to the spoken trigger, foregoing initiating a session of the digital assistant.

Detecting a trigger of a digital assistant

Disclosed are a system for identifying the position of mobile object, comprising a positioning module, a set of beacons and processor configured to determine the position of the positioning module based on the data gathered from the interaction between the positioning module and each one of the set of beacons. More specifically, the limited area positioning system utilizes signal emitted from the positioning module and the signals emitted from the each of the beacons in response to the signal from the positioning module. Using the signals transmitted from the positioning module and the beacons, at least three circles can be formed, and the limited area positioning system determines the intersecting point of those three circles as the position of the positioning module.

System and method for facilitating limited area GPS

Far-field extension for digital assistant services

Systems and processes are disclosed for dynamically adjusting a speech trigger threshold, which can be used in triggering a virtual assistant. Audio input can be received via a microphone. The received audio input can be sampled, and a confidence level can be determined of whether the sampled audio input includes a portion of a spoken trigger. In response to the confidence level exceeding a threshold, a virtual assistant can be triggered to receive a user command from the audio input. The threshold can be dynamically adjusted in response to perceived events (e.g., events indicating a user may be more or less likely to initiate speech interactions, events indicating a trigger may be difficult to detect, events indicating a trigger was missed, etc.), thereby minimizing both missed triggers and false positive triggering events.

Dynamic thresholds for always listening speech trigger

Digital assistant services based on device capabilities

This relates to providing an indication of the suitability of an acoustic environment for performing speech recognition. One process can include receiving an audio input and determining a speech recognition suitability based on the audio input. The speech recognition suitability can include a numerical, textual, graphical, or other representation of the suitability of an acoustic environment for performing speech recognition. The process can further include displaying a visual representation of the speech recognition suitability to indicate the likelihood that a spoken user input will be interpreted correctly. This allows a user to determine whether to proceed with the performance of a speech recognition process, or to move to a different location having a better acoustic environment before performing the speech recognition process. In some examples, the user device can disable operation of a speech recognition process in response to determining that the speech recognition suitability is below a threshold suitability.

Providing an indication of the suitability of speech recognition

Systems and processes for generating a speaker profile for use in performing speaker identification for a virtual assistant are provided. One example process can include receiving an audio input including user speech and determining whether a speaker of the user speech is a predetermined user based on a speaker profile for the predetermined user. In response to determining that the speaker of the user speech is the predetermined user, the user speech can be added to the speaker profile and operation of the virtual assistant can be triggered. In response to determining that the speaker of the user speech is not the predetermined user, the user speech can be added to an alternate speaker profile and operation of the virtual assistant may not be triggered. In some examples, contextual information can be used to verify results produced by the speaker identification process.

Speaker identification and unsupervised speaker adaptation techniques

Systems and processes for operating an intelligent automated assistant are provided. In accordance with one example, a method includes, at an electronic device with one or more processors and memory, receiving a natural-language speech input indicative of a request to the digital assistant; obtaining, by the digital assistant, context information; determining, by the digital assistant, a text-to-speech mode from a plurality of text-to-speech modes based on the obtained context information; and providing, by the digital assistant, an audio output with the determined text-to-speech mode, where the audio output is indicative of a speech response to the user request.

Growing community of inventors

Los Altos, CA, United States of America

Yoon Kim