Among patent assignments recently made public by the USPTO is the transfer of more than two dozen assets generally related to speech recognition and/or processing from Nuance Communications to a Delaware LLC. The transaction, dated January 1, 2021, followed by two and a half months the execution of an assignment of two US patents, also broadly directed to speech recognition, to the same LLC from another player in the space. This collection of similar assets suggests that additional patent cases may be on the verge of joining a slew of speech recognition campaigns spread out across nearly all stages of the litigation life cycle.

Inventor-controlled SpeakWare, Inc. has kicked off a new litigation campaign, suing Alphabet (Google) (8:18-cv-01299), Amazon (8:18-cv-01303), Apple (8:18-cv-01302), Microsoft (8:18-cv-01293), and Samsung (8:18-cv-01300) over the provision of devices offering voice-controlled virtual assistants that can be used to control (smart home) appliances, along with associated servers and devices that serve as hubs to enable other accused devices to control appliances—e.g., Fire TV devices for Amazon, Apple TV devices for Apple, and the SmartThings Smart Hub for Samsung. Each complaint asserts a single patent generally related to a single voice-operated transmitter used for remote control of a variety of appliances.