Disruption of speech understanding by adding a privacy sound thereto
AssigneeHerman Miller, Inc.
InventorsDaniel Mapes-Riordan, Jeffrey Specht
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A privacy apparatus adds a privacy sound into the environment, thereby confusing listeners as to which of the sounds is the real source. The privacy sound may be based on the speaker's own voice or may be based on another voice. At least one characteristic of the speaker (such as a characteristic of the speaker's speech) may be identified. The characteristic may then be used to access a database of the speaker's own voice or another's voice, and to form one or more voice streams to form the privacy sound. The privacy sound may thus permit disruption of the ability to understand the source speech of the user by eliminating segregation cues that the auditory system uses to interpret speech.
Claims33
A system for disrupting speech of a talker at a listener in an environment, the system comprising:
- a speech database comprising speech that is at least partly other than speech from the talker;
- a processor;
- and
- at least one speaker,
- wherein the processor is configured to:
- access the speech database;
- select a subset of the speech database based on at least one characteristic of the talker;
- and
- form at least one speech stream from the subset of the speech database, the speech stream for output on the at least one speaker, the at least one speech stream being formed by selecting a plurality of speech signals from the subset of the speech database and by generating at least one privacy output signal for output on the at least one speaker, the at least one privacy output signal comprised of the speech signals being summed with one another so that the speech signals at least partly overlap one another.
A method for disrupting speech of a talker at a listener in an environment, the method comprising:
- accessing a speech database comprising speech that is at least partly other than speech from the talker;
- selecting a subset of the speech database based on at least one characteristic of the talker;
- and
- forming at least one speech stream from the subset of the speech database, the speech stream for output on at least one speaker,
- wherein forming at least one speech stream from the subset of the speech database comprises:
- selecting a plurality of speech signals from the subset of the speech database;
- and
- generating at least one privacy output signal for output, the at least one privacy output signal comprised of the speech signals being summed with one another so that the speech signals at least partly overlap one another.
A system for disrupting speech of a talker at a listener in an environment, the system comprising:
- a speech database comprising speech that is at least partly other than speech from the talker;
- a processor;
- and
- at least one speaker,
- wherein the processor is configured to:
- access the speech database;
- select a subset of the speech database based on at least one characteristic of the talker;
- and
- form a single output stream from the subset of the speech database for output on the at least one speaker, the single output stream being formed by generating multiple speech streams and by summing each of the multiple speech streams to form the single output stream.
A method for disrupting speech of a talker at a listener in an environment, the method comprising:
- accessing a speech database comprising speech that is at least partly other than speech from the talker;
- selecting a subset of the speech database based on at least one characteristic of the talker;
- and
- forming at least one speech stream from the subset of the speech database, the speech stream for output on at least one speaker,
- wherein forming at least one speech stream from the subset of the speech database comprises forming multiple speech streams, and
- wherein forming multiple speech streams comprises forming each of the multiple speech streams and summing each of the multiple speech streams to form a single output stream for output on the at least one speaker.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.