Recent Patents in Signal Processing (September 2011) - Speech Processing

For our September 2011 edition, we focus on patents in the area of Speech Processing. The selection below includes patents issued in the recent past, and includes inventions in improved speech recognition, concealment of lost speech data, denoising of speech and models for speech recognition. If you have an interesting patent to share when we feature speech processing-related patents the next time, or if you are especially interested in a signal processing research field that you would want to be highlighted in this section, please send email to Shantanu Rane (rane AT merl DOT com).

US 8,005,668, "Adaptive confidence thresholds in telematics system speech recognition" by U. Arun, filed 22 September 2004, issued 23 August 2011, assigned to General Motors, LLC. (Detroit, MI).

US 8,000,976, "Speech band extension device", by A. Tashiro and H. Aoyagi, filed 27 January 2006, issued 16 August 2011, assigned to OKI Electric Industry Co., Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan).

US 8,000,971, "Discriminative training of multi-state barge-in models for speech processing", by A.Ljolje, filed 31 October 2007, issued 16 August 2011, assigned to AT&T Intellectual Property, LLC. (Atlanta, GA).

US 8,000,962, "Method and system for using input signal quality in speech recognition", by J. Doyle and J. Pickering, filed 19 May 2006, issued 16 August 2011, assigned to Nuance Communications, Inc. (Burlington, MA).

US 7,996,225, "Utilizing speech grammar rules written in a markup language", by P. Schmid, R. Lipe, E. Ellerman and R. Chambers, filed 21 May 2008, issued 9 August 2011, assigned to Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA).

US 7,996,230, "Selective security masking within recorded speech", by K. Doren, filed 6 August 2009, issued 9 August 2011, assigned to Intellisist, Inc. (Bellevue, WA).

US 7,983,916, "Sampling rate independent speech recognition", by R. Chengalvarayan, filed 3 July 2007, issued 19 July 2011, assigned to General Motors, LLC. (Detroit, MI).

US 7,966,185, "Application of emotion-based intonation and prosody to speech in text-to-speech systems", by E. Eide, filed 14 July 2008, issued 21 June 2011, assigned to Nuance Communications (Burlington, MA).

US 7,953,596, "Method of denoising a noisy signal including speech and noise components", by G. Pinto, filed 26 February 2007, issued 31 May 2011, assigned to PARROT Societe Anonyme (Paris, FR).

US 7,930,176, "Packet loss concealment for block-independent speech codecs", by J.-H. Chen, filed 26 September 2005, issued 19 April 2011, assigned to Broadcomm Corporation (Irvine, CA).