VB Assets, LLC has filed an Eastern District of Texas complaint against Samsung (2:24-cv-00828), targeting the provision of the Bixby 2.0 voice assistant and supporting devices such as earbuds, home appliances, smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, TVs, and more. The plaintiff previously asserted four of the six former VoiceBox patents appearing in the new complaint against Amazon, two of which were the partial subject of a District of Delaware verdict in VB Assets favor last November. A couple of weeks ago, District Judge Maryellen Noreika ruled on the parties’ posttrial motions in that case, trimming the jury’s running royalty award down from $46.7M to just over $40M based on a judgment as a matter of law that no reasonable jury could have found one of the four tried claims infringed. Characterizing itself as “ill-equipped to assess whether the jury’s awarded royalty rate would be an appropriate rate for the ongoing royalty”, the court asked for supplemental briefing concerning that calculation; VB Assets just made its submission.

VB Assets, LLC has filed a second complaint against Amazon (1:24-cv-00839), again in the District of Delaware, alleging infringement of five more natural language processing patents through the provision its various Alexa products (identified as including “Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show, FireTV, Alexa apps, and Alexa cloud” products). The case drops as District Judge Maryellen Noreika considers fully briefed posttrial motions following a November 2023 jury verdict in the first case filed by VB Assets. That jury awarded VB Assets $46.7M in damages, as a running royalty, for the infringement of four claims, one from each of four patents, an award that Amazon has asked the court to set aside and that VB Assets has asked be upped with a “modest enhancement” (by half) to $70.05M.

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.

Currently available USPTO records indicate that most of the patents held by VoiceBox Technologies, a Washington-based company developing voice assistant and “conversational AI” technology, including significant work for automotive clients, were transferred in March 2018 to VB Assets, LLC, an entity created in Delaware on February 12, 2018. That entity has now turned plaintiff, suing Amazon (1:19-cv-01410) over six of the patents received, all generally related to various aspects of voice processing, targeting the tech giant’s provision of Alexa products. The complaint recounts an extensive history of purported contacts between VoiceBox Technologies and Amazon, beginning in 2011 and ending in April 2017.