SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR THE SECURE, REAL-TIME, HIGH ACCURACY CONVERSION OF GENERAL QUALITY SPEECH INTO TEXT

• US 20090292539A1
• Filed: 05/22/2009
• Published: 11/26/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 10/23/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Advanced Messaging Technologies, Inc. (J2 Global, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: J2 Global, Inc.
• Inventors: Jaroker, Jon
• Granted Patent: US 8,738,374 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/235
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/00 Administration; Management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 50/18 Legal services
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/26 Speech to text systems G10L15/08 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 2201/40 using speech recognition speech recognition per se G10L15/00
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 2201/60 Medium conversion

Abstract

Described is a speech-to-text conversion system and method that provides secure, real-time and high-accuracy conversion of general-quality speech into text. The system is designed to interface with external devices and services, providing a simple and convenient manner to transcribe audio that may be stored elsewhere such as a wireless phone'"'"'s voice mail, or occurring between two or more parties such as a conference call. The first step in the system'"'"'s process ensures secure and private transcription by separating an audio stream into many audio shreds, each of which has duration of only a few seconds and cannot reveal the context of the conversation. A workforce of geographically distributed transcription agents who transcribe the audio shreds is able to generate transcription in real time, with many agents working in parallel on a single conversation. No one agent (or group of agents) receives a sufficient number of audio shreds to reconstruct the context of any conversation. The use of human transcribers allows the system to overcome limitations typical of computer-based speech recognition and permits accurate transcription of general-quality speech even in acoustically hostile environments.

Claims

1. A system, comprising:

a receiving element to receive audio segments which are portions of audio streams, the receiving element creating sub-segments from the audio segments;

a mixing element receiving the sub-segments from the audio streams and randomizing the sub-segments;

a transmitting element sending the randomized sub-segments to a plurality of transcribers, each of the randomized sub-segments being transcribed into text by the transcriber which received the randomized sub-segment; and

a text receiving element receiving the transcribed text from each of the transcribers.

2-29. -29. (canceled)