SPEECH BOOKMARKS IN A VOICE USER INTERFACE USING A SPEECH RECOGNITION ENGINE AND ACOUSTICALLY GENERATED BASEFORMS

• US 20080243517A1
• Filed: 03/27/2007
• Published: 10/02/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 03/27/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc. (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: MUSCHETT, BRIEN H., PARKER, JULIA A.
• Granted Patent: US 7,881,938 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/275
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/22 Procedures used during a speech recognition process, e.g. man-machine dialogue

Abstract

A system and method for navigating a dialog hierarchy from a voice user interface (VUI) using speech bookmarks. The method can detect a user spoken command for bookmarking a location within a dialog hierarchy of a voice response system. A user spoken bookmark can be received, which is added to a personalized bookmark grammar that is associated with a user who spoke the bookmark name. A database record can be used to associate the new bookmark name with a location within the dialog hierarchy. During a subsequent interaction between the user and the voice response system, the user can speak the bookmark name, which results in a match being detected between the spoken phrase and the personalized bookmark grammar. The voice response system can then navigate to the location within bookmark hierarchy that is associated with the speech bookmark.

Claims

1. A configurable method for navigating a dialog hierarchy from a voice user interface comprising:

detecting a user spoken command for bookmarking a location within a dialog hierarchy of a voice response system;

receiving a user spoken bookmark name;

adding the user spoken bookmark name to a personalized bookmark grammar associated with a user who spoke the bookmark name;

storing a record that relates the added bookmark name to the location within the dialog hierarchy;

during a subsequent interaction between the user and the voice response system, receiving the user spoken bookmark name;

the voice response system determining that the user spoken bookmark name matches the bookmark name stored in the personalized bookmark grammar; and

the voice response system navigating to the location within bookmark hierarchy that is related to the bookmark name in response to the determining step.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

audibly prompting for a name for a bookmark upon detecting the user spoken command, wherein the user spoken bookmark name is received as a response to the prompting step.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

determining a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that corresponds to the location, wherein the storing step stores the determined URI in the record.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the URI identifies a hyperlink anchor of a dialog language based document interpreted by the voice response system, wherein said dialog language is any language of a set of languages where the set of languages includes at least one language selected from a group consisting of VoiceXML and SALT.

5. The method of claim 3, wherein the URI is specific to a speech enabled application, wherein the bookmark name stored in the personalized bookmark grammar is limited to interactions involving the user and the speech enabled application, whereby other users have different user specific speech bookmarks stored within other personalized bookmark grammars.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the personalized bookmark grammar is a voice enrolled grammar.

7. The method of claim 6, wherein the voice enrolled grammar is a Speech Recognition Grammar Specification compliant grammar.

8. The method of claim 6, wherein the voice enrolled grammar, which is used to add the speech bookmark, is configured to be referenced via a standard SRGS grammar.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein a software language in which the dialog hierarchy is specified is a dialog based language wherein said dialog language is any language of a set of languages where the set of languages includes at least one language selected from a group consisting of VoiceXML and SALT.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein said steps of claim 1 are performed by at least one machine in accordance with at least one computer program stored in a computer readable media, said computer programming having a plurality of code sections that are executable by the at least one machine.

11. A voice response system comprising:

a speech recognition engine having voice enrollment capabilities;

a grammar data store configured to store speech bookmarks, each speech bookmark being added using the voice enrollment capabilities, wherein each speech bookmark is associated with a dialog location of a hierarchy of menus used by the voice response system; and

a voice user interface configured to permit voice based interactions between a user and the voice response system, wherein when a speech bookmark, stored in a personalized bookmark grammar that is part of the grammar data store, is received through the voice user interface the voice response system automatically and directly proceeds to the dialog location.

12. The system of claim 11, wherein the hierarchy of menus is specified using a dialog based language, wherein said dialog language is any language of a set of languages where the set of languages includes at least one language selected from a group consisting of VoiceXML and SALT.

13. The system of claim 12, wherein each of the dialog locations is a URI specified location.

14. The system of claim 11, wherein the speech processing system is implemented using commercial off-the-shelf components.

15. The system of claim 11, wherein the speech processing system is implemented using open standards.

16. The system of claim 11, wherein voice enrollment capabilities utilize acoustic baseform services.

17. The system of claim 11, wherein each user of the voice response system is associated with a set of user specific speech bookmarks.

18. The system of claim 11, wherein audio captured using the voice enrollment capabilities is configured to be presented by the voice user interface to the user.

19. The system of claim 18, wherein the voice user interface is configured to audibly list a set of personalized bookmark entries, wherein said captured audio is used when audibly listing the set of personalized bookmark entries.