Voice-operated remote control for TV and electronic systems

• US 20060028337A1
• Filed: 08/09/2005
• Published: 02/09/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 08/09/2004
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Qi P. Li
• Original Assignee: Qi P. Li
• Inventors: Li, Qi P.
• Application Number:
  US11/199,895
• Publication Number:
  US 20060028337A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 340/539.100
• CPC Class Codes: G08C 17/00 Arrangements for transmitting signals characterised by the use of a wireless electrical link
• CPC Class Codes: G08C 2201/31 Voice input
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/42203 sound input device, e.g. microphone

Abstract

The present invention is to provide a voice-operated handhold remote control to be used with home and office appliances, such as TV, projector, DVD/CD, VCR, sound system, and many others. A user can use voice commands through a remote control of this invention to execute control functions over the appliances. To reach the object, the remote control of the present invention comprises at least: (1) a button for both muting and push-to-talk; (2) a microphone or microphone array; (3) an automatic speech recognizer; (4) a digital signal microprocessor; (5) memory; and (6) a signal transmitter.

Claims

1. A handheld battery-powered wireless remote control for appliances comprising:

a keypad which a user through key input can control a designated appliance in a keypad-operated mode;

a dedicated key in the keypad which can switch the remote control into a voice-operated mode in which a user through voice input can control the designated appliance;

a microphone device for receiving voice input;

a digital signal microprocessor;

a plurality of memories comprising RAM and ROM;

a radio-frequency transmitter;

a battery power source; and

while in the voice-operated mode, at the first, the radio-frequency transmitter will send a “

mute”

control signal to the appliance having loudspeaker that will be turned into a mute condition, then the digital microprocessor converts the voice input received by the microphone device into corresponding control signals, which are transmitted out to the designated appliance by the radio-frequency transmitter to control the operation of the designated appliance.

2. The remoter control as claimed in claim 1, wherein the microphone device is a microphone array comprises more than on microphone components.

3. The remoter control as claimed in claim 1, wherein the microphone device is a microphone.

4. The remoter control as claimed in claim 2, wherein the digital signal microprocessor further comprising:

a plurality of preamplifiers to amplify analog signals received from microphone components, where one preamplifier corresponds one voice signal channel;

an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) to convert the received analogue signal to digital signal;

an array signal processor to convert received multiple-channel signals into single-channel signals which have improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR);

a noise-reduction and speech enhancement unit to further improve the single-channel SNR;

a keyword-spotting unit for spotting voice commands from voice signals; and

a speech recognizer unit to convert the voice commands into one or a sequence of control operation codes or radio frequencies.

5. The digital signal processor as claimed in claim 4, wherein the array signal processor implements an array signal processing algorithm, such as a delay-and-sum algorithm, a filter-and-sum algorithm, a linear algorithm, or a nonlinear algorithm.

6. The array signal processor as claimed in claim 5, wherein the nonlinear algorithm of the array signal processor includes one or more nonlinear functions, such as a sigmoid function.

7. The digital signal processor as claimed in claim 4, wherein the noise reduction and speech enhancement algorithm is a Weiner filter algorithm to further reduce noise and enhance speech of the signals.

8. The digital signal processor as claimed in claim 4, wherein the noise reduction and speech enhancement algorithm is an auditory-based algorithm to further reduce noise and enhance speech of the signals.

9. The digital signal processor as claimed in claim 4, wherein the keyword-spotting unit further comprising acoustic models representing phonemes, sub-words, keywords, and key-phrases which need to be sorted, a garbage model representing all other acoustic sounds or units, and a decoder which can detect keywords or commands from voice signals through searching and using the models.

10. The digital signal processor as claimed in claim 4, wherein keyword-spotting unit and the speech recognizer unit further comprising:

a feature extracting unit to convert time-domain speech signal into frequency-domain features for recognition;

a language model to model the statistical property of spoken languages to help in search and decoding;

a set of acoustic models to model acoustic units;

phonemes, sub-words, words, or spoken phrases, where the model can be a hidden Markov model to model the statistical property; and

a decoder converting a sequence of speech features into a sequence of acoustic units by searching, and then mapping the recognized acoustic units to the text of control commands, control codes, or a sequence of numbers of radio frequency.

11. The digital signal processor as claimed in claim 1, wherein the transmitter transmits the radio frequency to the receiver of appliances in a predetermined sequence of control commands signals which are equivalent to these control commands signals sent by the corresponding key-input operations.