AUDIBLE METADATA

• US 20090070114A1
• Filed: 09/10/2007
• Published: 03/12/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 09/10/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Slack Technologies LLC (Salesforce.com, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Yahoo! Inc. (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: Staszak, Chris
• Granted Patent: US 9,812,023 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/260
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/438 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: G09B 5/06 with both visual and audible presentation of the material to be studied
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/00 Speech synthesis; Text to speech systems

Abstract

This disclosure describes systems and methods for audibly presenting metadata. Audibly presentable metadata is referred to as audible metadata. Audible metadata may be associated with one or more media objects. In one embodiment, audible metadata is pre-recorded requiring little or no processing before it can be rendered. In another embodiment, audible metadata is text, and a text-to-speech conversion device may be used to convert the text into renderable audible metadata. Audible metadata may be rendered at any point before or after rendering of a media object, or may be rendered during rendering of a media object via a dynamic user request.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

analyzing a media object to identify metadata associated with the media object;

analyzing said metadata to identify audible metadata;

identifying a format of the audible metadata; and

if said format is not in a desired format, converting said audible metadata into said desired format.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

locating the identified metadata if the identified metadata is at a location different from the media object.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

locating the identified audible metadata if the identified audible metadata is at a location different from the identified metadata.

4. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

passing said formatted audible metadata to a media player for audible rendering to a user so as to audibly identify information related to said media object to said user.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein said audible metadata is text and the identifying a format step comprises:

converting said audible metadata by text to speech conversion.

6. The method of claim 1 wherein said audible metadata is digitized audio.

7. The method of claim 6 wherein said digitized audio comprises a digital recording of a person.

8. The method of claim 7 wherein the person is a recording artist.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein said identifying a format step comprises:

converting said audible metadata from a first digital format to a second digital format.

15. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

making said audible metadata available to a media player.

16. The method of claim 15, further comprising:

converting said audible metadata to a desired format prior to the making said audible metadata available step.

17. The method of claim 15, further comprising:

charging a fee to a user when the making said audible metadata available step is carried out.

10. A system comprising:

a media player module that accesses a media object and renders the media object to the user; and

an audible metadata module that accesses metadata associated with the media object and renders an audible form of the metadata to the user.

11. The system of claim 10, further comprising:

an automated text to speech module that reads text data, if said metadata is in the form of text data, and converts it to speech to generate the audible form of the metadata.

12. The system of claim 10, further comprising:

storage for storing media objects, metadata and/or audible metadata.

13. The system of claim 10, further comprising:

a metadata retrieval module that communicates with a remote system to locate and retrieve said metadata if located separately from said system.

14. The system of claim 10, wherein the audible metadata module renders the audible metadata in response to a command received from the user.

18. A computer readable medium, storing computer data in machine readable form comprising:

computer code for receiving a command to render a renderable media object comprising renderable media object data and information identifying metadata associated with the renderable media object data;

wherein the metadata identifies audio data different from the renderable media object data, the audio data being audible metadata associated with the media object; and

computer code for rendering the renderable media object data and further rendering the audio data.

19. The computer readable medium of claim 18 wherein the audio data is stored as part of the media object.

20. The computer readable medium of claim 18 wherein the metadata identifies a different media object as the audio data.

21. The computer readable medium of claim 20 wherein the metadata identifies the different media object as being stored in a location remote from the computer readable medium.

22. A method comprising:

receiving a request for a media object;

accessing the media object;

accessing metadata associated with the media object;

identifying audible metadata;

rendering the media object; and

rendering the audible metadata for audible perception.

23. The method of claim 22 wherein accessing metadata comprises:

locating the metadata.

24. A media object comprising:

a content portion;

a metadata portion; and

an audible metadata portion that when rendered via a media player provides audible information about said content portion.