An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

The various methods and devices described herein relate to devices which, in at least certain embodiments, may include one or more sensors for providing data relating to user activity and at least one processor for causing the device to respond based on the user activity which was determined, at least in part, through the sensors. The response by the device may include a change of state of the device, and the response may be automatically performed after the user activity is determined.

Automated Response to and Sensing of User Activity in Portable Devices

A virtual assistant uses context information to supplement natural language or gestural input from a user. Context helps to clarify the user's intent and to reduce the number of candidate interpretations of the user's input, and reduces the need for the user to provide excessive clarification input. Context can include any available information that is usable by the assistant to supplement explicit user input to constrain an information-processing problem and/or to personalize results. Context can be used to constrain solutions during various phases of processing, including, for example, speech recognition, natural language processing, task flow processing, and dialog generation.

Using context information to facilitate processing of commands in a virtual assistant

A method and apparatus are provided for building an intelligent automated assistant. Embodiments of the present invention rely on the concept of “active ontologies” (e.g., execution environments constructed in an ontology-like manner) to build and run applications for use by intelligent automated assistants. In one specific embodiment, a method for building an automated assistant includes interfacing a service-oriented architecture that includes a plurality of remote services to an active ontology, where the active ontology includes at least one active processing element that models a domain. At least one of the remote services is then registered for use in the domain.

Method and apparatus for building an intelligent automated assistant

Among other things, techniques and systems are disclosed for implementing contextual voice commands. On a device, a data item in a first context is displayed. On the device, a physical input selecting the displayed data item in the first context is received. On the device, a voice input that relates the selected data item to an operation in a second context is received. The operation is performed on the selected data item in the second context.

Contextual voice commands

A high quality speech synthesizer in various embodiments concatenates speech waveforms referenced by a large speech database. Speech quality is further improved by speech unit selection and concatenation smoothing.

Speech synthesis using concatenation of speech waveforms

A system is disclosed for generating a time scale modification of a digital waveform. A digital waveform provider produces an input digital waveform at a first time resolution, the digital waveform being a sequence of overlapping speech segment windows. A time-domain time scale modification process overlap adds selected windows from the input digital waveform to create an output digital waveform representing a time scale modification of the input digital waveform. The process operates at a second time resolution lower than the first time resolution to determine the relative positions between adjacent windows in the output digital waveform.

Time scale modification of digitally sampled waveforms in the time domain

A method of prosody translation is given. A target input symbol sequence is provided, including a first set of speech prosody descriptors. An instance-based learning algorithm is applied to a corpus of speech unit descriptors to select an output symbol sequence representative of the target input symbol sequence and including a second set of speech prosody descriptors. The second set differs from the first set.

Corpus-based prosody translation system

L'invention concerne un dispositif de synthese de la parole de haute qualite, qui selon divers mode de realisation, permet de concatener des signaux vocaux connus d'une grande base de donnees vocale. La selection d'une unite vocale et le lissage de la concatenation permettent egalement d'ameliorer la qualite de la parole.

Jan Demoortel

Papers

Speech synthesis using concatenation of speech waveforms

Time scale modification of digitally sampled waveforms in the time domain

Corpus-based prosody translation system

Synthese de la parole par concatenation de signaux vocaux

Time scale modification of digital signals in the time domain