ANDOVER, MASS.— Veveo has been awarded a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the area of speech-based interfaces for devices that allow natural conversations similar to the way people speak with each other, the company said.
The patent, entitled “Method of and System for Using Conversation State Information in a Conversational Interaction System” (USPTO No. 8,577,671), covers a speech-based system’s capability to recognize whether a subsequent query is related to the previous one that a user input into a system, thereby allowing the user to build on a previous query without repetition. This capability also allows devices to “know” when a context has changed or is ambiguous, thereby giving users appropriate responses that appear natural and humanlike.
Veveo says the significance of such capabilities in a device or application is that users can conduct an ongoing dialog for discovery and navigation, going beyond the simple voice commands and isolated queries that are typical of speech-driven systems. The system maintains awareness of the user’s intent, thereby offering the ability to drill down into a query, as well as change queries during navigation. As a result, the application of this technology allows consumers to use the natural thought progression that is typical when trying to navigate content libraries.
A video demonstration of this technology can be viewed on YouTube. This patent gives Veveo’s portfolio a count of 47 issued patents. Veveo has filed more than 80 patent applications to date for advanced technologies that support more than 100 million connected devices and televisions globally through Tier-1 service providers, device OEMs and pay-TV operators.
