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

• US 20080049908A1
• Filed: 10/31/2007
• Published: 02/28/2008
• 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
• Granted Patent: US 8,976,944 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 379/88.14
• 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 boundary selection sub-system adapted to process a message by looking for the boundaries between sections of the message which carry different types of content or carry different types of message.

2. The system of claim 1 in which the computer implemented boundary selection sub-system analyses for the following component part:

a telephone number.

3. The system of claim 1 in which the computer implemented boundary selection sub-system analyses for the following component part:

an appointment.

4. The system of claim 1 in which the computer implemented boundary selection sub-system analyses for the following component part:

an address.

5. The system of claim 1 in which a message is processed using a first conversion sub-system that partially translates the message and the output of that first conversion sub-system is used by the boundary selection sub-system.