US 7,069,221 B2Granted

Non-target barge-in detection

AssigneeSpeechWorks International, Inc.

InventorsMatthew D. Crane, Mark Arthur Holthouse, John Ngoc Nguyen, Michael Stuart Phillips, Stephen Richard Springer

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Abstract

A speech recognition system plays prompts to a user in order to obtain information from the user. If the user begins to speak, the prompt should stop. However, the system may receive sounds other than speech from the user while playing a prompt, in which case the prompt should continue. The system temporarily stops a prompt when it detects a sound or when it preliminarily determines that a detected sound may be a target sound (such as words from the user). The system then determines whether the received sound is a target sound or some other sound (such as coughing or a door shutting). If the received sound is not determined to be a target sound, then the prompt is resumed. The prompt can be resumed at any appropriate point, such as the point where it was stopped, a prior phrase boundary, or the beginning of the prompt.

Claims22

Dependent claims

A speech recognition system comprising:

an output device configured to play a speech prompt to a user of the system, the speech prompt conveying information to the user or prompting the user for speech input;
a detector configured to receive a sound signal indicative of a possible target sound and to output a signal representative of the sound signal and a signal indicating receipt of the sound signal, so as to permit interruption of further output of the prompt if the detector receives the sound signal while the output device is playing the prompt;
a recognizer coupled to the detector, the recognizer being configured to receive the signal representative of the sound signal and to output a recognizer signal indicative of whether the sound signal is a target sound;
and
a control unit coupled to the output device, the detector, and the recognizer, the control unit being configured to receive the recognizer signal and, if the detector received the sound signal while the output device was playing a prompt and the recognizer signal indicates that the sound signal is other than a target sound, to cause the output device to play at least a portion of the prompt being played by the output device when the sound signal was received by the detector.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.