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US 8,942,981 B2Granted
Natural language call router
AssigneeCellco Partnership
InventorsVeronica Klein, Deborah Washington Brown
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A natural language call router forwards an incoming call from a caller to an appropriate destination. The call router has a speech recognition mechanism responsive to words spoken by a caller for producing recognized text corresponding to the spoken words. A robust parsing mechanism is responsive to the recognized text for detecting a class of words in the recognized text. The class is defined as a group of words having a common attribute. An interpreting mechanism is responsive to the detected class for determining the appropriate destination for routing the call.
Claims18
A call router comprising:
- a memory storing program instructions and a rule set;
- a telephone interface configured to receive a speech signal representing words spoken by a caller;
- a processor coupled to the memory and the telephone interface, wherein the processor is configured to perform functions in response to executing the programming instructions stored in the memory, including functions of:
- in response to the received speech signal, produce recognized text having words representative of the spoken words;
- detect a class of the words in the recognized text, wherein the class is a group of words having a common attribute and each class of words is assigned a weight;
- in response to detection of a combination of classes in the recognized text, identify rules that contain matches to the combination of classes detected in the recognized text from among multiple rules defining destinations for different combinations of classes;
- select a rule from the identified rules based on a number of detected classes and a corresponding sum of the weights assigned to the classes in the combination of classes in the recognized text;
- interpret the selected rule to identify a destination for routing the call;
- and
- route the call to the identified destination.
7 more elements
An article of manufacture comprising:
- a non-transitory machine readable storage medium;
- and
- executable code for a call router embodied in the medium,
- wherein execution of the code by a processor causes the call router to implement functions comprising:
- recognizing words spoken by a caller in a natural language to produce recognized text having words representative of the spoken words;
- detecting classes of words in the recognized text, each class being a group of words having a common attribute and each class of words is assigned a weight;
- in response to detection of a combination of classes of words in the recognized text, identifying rules that contain matches to the combination of classes of words detected in the recognized text from among multiple rules defining destinations for different combinations of classes;
- selecting a rule from the identified rules based on a number of detected classes and a corresponding sum of the weights assigned to the classes in the combination of classes in the recognized text;
- and
- determining a destination for routing the call in accordance with the selected rule.
7 more elements
A method, comprising steps of
- recognizing, by a speech recognizer, words spoken by a caller in a natural language to produce recognized text;
- detecting, by a robust parser, classes of words in the recognized text based on class definitions for each class including a group of words having a common attribute and each class of words is assigned a weight;
- in response to detection of a combination of classes of words in the recognized text, identifying rules that contain matches to the combination of classes of words detected in the recognized text from among multiple rules defining destinations for different combinations of classes;
- selecting a rule from the identified rules based on a number of detected classes and a corresponding sum of the weights assigned to the classes in the combination of classes in the recognized text;
- and
- determining the destination for routing the call in accordance with the selected rule.
3 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.