Mass-Scale, User-Independent, Device-Independent Voice Messaging System

• US 20080162132A1
• Filed: 10/31/2007
• Published: 07/03/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 02/10/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: SpinVox Limited (Microsoft Corporation)
• Inventors: Doulton, Daniel Michael
• Granted Patent: US 8,953,753 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/235
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/26 Speech to text systems G10L15/08 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 2201/60 Medium conversion
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/4936 Speech interaction details speech recognition per se G10L15/00
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/5183 Call or contact centers with computer-telephony arrangements
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/53333 Message receiving aspects

Abstract

A mass-scale, user-independent, device-independent, voice messaging system that converts unstructured voice messages into text for display on a screen is disclosed. The system comprises (i) computer implemented sub-systems and also (ii) a network connection to human operators providing transcription and quality control; the system being adapted to optimise the effectiveness of the human operators by further comprising 3 core sub-systems, namely (i) a pre-processing front end that determines an appropriate conversion strategy; (ii) one or more conversion resources; and (iii) a quality control sub-system.

Claims

1. A mass-scale, user-independent, device-independent, voice messaging system that converts an unstructured voice message into text for display on a screen;

the system comprising (i) computer implemented sub-systems and also (ii) a network connection to human operators providing transcription and quality control;

the system being adapted to optimise the effectiveness of the human operators by further comprising

a computer implemented lattice sub-system that generates a lattice of possible word or phrase sequences and enables a human operator to guide a conversion sub-system by being shown one or more candidate converted words or phrases from the lattice and enabling the operator to either select that candidate word or phrase or, by entering one or more characters for a different converted word or phrase, to trigger the conversion sub-system to propose an alternative word or phrase.

2. The system of claim 1 in which the lattice sub-system receives inputs from a sub-system that handles call-pair history information.

3. The system of claim 1 in which the lattice sub-system receives inputs from conversion resources.

4. The system of claim 1 in which the lattice sub-system receives inputs from a context sub-system that has knowledge of the context of a message.

5. The system of claim 1 in which the lattice sub-system learns, from the human operator inputs, likely words or phrases corresponding to a sound pattern.

6. The system of claim 1 in which the human operator is required to select only a single key to accept a word or phrase.

7. The system of claim 1 in which the lattice sub-system automatically provides capitalisation and punctuation.

8. The system of claim 1 in which the lattice sub-system can propose candidate numbers, real nouns, web addresses, e-mail addresses, physical addresses, location information, or other coordinates.

9. The system of claim 1 in which the lattice sub-system automatically differentiates between parts of the message that are likely to be important and those that are likely to be unimportant.

10. The system of claim 1 in which unimportant parts of the message are confirmed by the operator as belonging to a class proposed by the lattice sub-system and are then converted solely by a machine ASR engine.

11. The system of claim 1 in which the human operator can speak the correct word to the conversion system, which then automatically transcribes it.

12. The system of claim 3 in which the conversion resources analyse a converted word or phrase against an on-line corpus of knowledge.

13. The system of claim 12 in which the on-line corpus of knowledge is the internet, as accessed by a search engine.

14. The system of claim 13 in which the on-line corpus of knowledge is a search engine database, such as Google.

15. The system of claim 1 in which the message is a voicemail intended for a mobile telephone and the voice message is converted to text and sent to that mobile telephone.

16. The system of claim 1 in which the message is a voice message intended for an instant messaging service and the voice message is converted to text and sent to an instant messaging service for a display on a screen.

17. The system of claim 1 in which the message is a voice message intended for a web service and the voice message is converted to text and sent to a server for display as part of the web service.

18. The system of claim 1 in which the message is a voice message intended to be converted to text format and sent as a text message.

19. The system of claim 1 in which the message is a voice message intended to be converted to text format and sent as an email message.

20. The system of claim 1 in which the message is a voice message intended to be converted to text format and sent as a note or memo, by email or text, to an originator of the message.

21. A mobile telephone network that is connected to the system of claim 1.

22. A mobile telephone when displaying a message converted by the system of claim 1.

23. A computer display screen when displaying a message converted by the system of claim 1.

24. A method of providing voice messaging, comprising the step of a user sending a voice message to a messaging system as claimed in claim 1.