Information processing apparatus, information processing method, and storage medium

• US 6,961,705 B2
• Filed: 01/19/2001
• Issued: 11/01/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 01/25/2000
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Sony Corporation (Sony Group Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Sony Corporation (Sony Group Corp.)
• Inventors: Yokono, Jun, Tanaka, Miyuki, Oe, Toshio, Aoyagi, Seiichi, Asano, Yasuharu
• Primary Examiner(s): ARMSTRONG, ANGELA A
• Application Number:
  US09/765,962
• Publication Number:
  US 20010041977A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,747 Days
• Field of Search: 704/9, 704/251, 704/257, 704/270, 704/275, 704/260, 704/235, 704/272, 704/200, 706/52, 706/58, 725/116, 725/14, 725/34, 705/27, 705/10, 705/14, 705/74, 705/26, 463/40, 434/321, 379/88.24, 455/3.04
• US Class Current: 704/275
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/16 Sound input; Sound output speech processing G10L
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/22 Procedures used during a speech recognition process, e.g. man-machine dialogue

Abstract

Speech of a user is recognized in a speech recognizing unit. Based on a result of the speech recognition, a language processing unit, a dialog managing unit and a response generating unit cooperatively created a dialog sentence for exchanging a dialog with the user. Also, based on the speech recognition result, the dialog managing unit collects user information regarding, e.g., interests and tastes of the user. Therefore, the user information regarding, the interests and tastes of the user can be easily collected.

Claims

1. An information processing apparatus for collecting user information, comprising:

speech recognizing means for recognizing speech of a user;

dialog sentence creating means for creating a dialog sentence to exchange a dialog with the user based on a result of the speech recognition performed by said speech recognizing means; and

collecting means for collecting the user information based on the speech recognition result, wherein said collecting means tracks when a same topic is included in the speech of the user for a designated length of time based on the speech recognition result and collects the user information based on the designated length of time.

2. An information processing apparatus according to claim 1, further comprising storage means for storing the user information.

3. An information processing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein said dialog sentence creating means outputs the dialog sentence as one of a text and synthesized sounds.

4. An information processing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein said collecting means collects the user information based on an appearance frequency of a word contained in the speech recognition result.

5. An information processing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein said collecting means collects the user information based on a broader form of a word contained in the speech recognition result.

6. An information processing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the user information is information indicating interests of the user.