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

Media objects are transformed into active, connected objects via identifiers embedded into them or their containers. In the context of a user's playback experience, a decoding process extracts the identifier from a media object and possibly additional context information and forwards it to a server. The server, in turn, maps the identifier to an action, such as returning metadata, re-directing the request to one or more other servers, requesting information from another server to identify the media object, etc. The linking process applies to broadcast objects as well as objects transmitted over networks in streaming and compressed file formats.

Connected audio and other media objects

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 for detecting against unauthorized transmission of digital works comprises the steps of maintaining a registry of information permitting identification of digital copyrighted works, monitoring a network for transmission of at least one packet-based digital signal, extracting at least one feature from the at least one digital signal, comparing the extracted at least one feature with registry information and applying business rules based on the comparison result.

Copyright detection and protection system and method

A method for reproducing speech signals at a controlled speed whereby rate conversion of the time axis may be facilitated, and a method for synthesizing the speech whereby pitch conversion can be realized by a simplified structure based on the encoded speech data without changing the phoneme. With the speech reproducing method, an encoding unit 2 discriminates whether an input speech signal is voiced or unvoiced. Based on the results of discrimination, the encoding unit 2 performs sinusoidal synthesis and encoding for a signal portion found to be voiced, while performing vector quantization by closed-loop search for an optimum vector for a portion found to be unvoiced using an analysis-by-synthesis method, in order to find encoded parameters. The decoding unit 3 compands the time axis of the encoded parameters obtained every pre-set frames at a period modification unit 4 for modifying the output period of the parameters for creating modified encoded parameters associated with different time points corresponding to the pre-set frames. A speech synthesis unit 6 synthesizes the voiced speech portion and the unvoiced speech portion based on the modified encoded parameters. With the speech synthesizing unit, an encoded bit stream or encoded data is outputted by an encoded data outputting unit 301., Of these data, at least pitch data and amplitude data of the spectral envelope are sent via a data conversion unit 302 to a waveform synthesis unit 302, where the number of amplitude data of the spectral envelope is changed without changing the shape of the spectral envelope depending on a pitch desired pitch value. A waveform synthesis unit 303 synthesizes the speech waveform based on the converted spectral envelope data and pitch data.

Method and apparatus for reproducing speech signals, method and apparatus for decoding the speech, method and apparatus for synthesizing the speech and portable radio terminal apparatus

In January 2012, MPEG finalized the new MPEG-D Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) standard, which enables the coding of a variety of audio content at low bitrates. USAC provides low-bitrate coding by integrating a speech codec and an audio codec into a unified system. In USAC, Predictive Vector Coding (PVC) is added to Enhanced Spectral Band Replication (eSBR) to improve the subjective quality, especially for speech at low bitrates. For speech signals, there is generally a relatively high correlation between the spectral envelopes of low- and high-frequency bands. The PVC scheme exploits this by predicting the high-frequency envelopes from the low-frequency ones, with the coefficient matrices for the prediction being coded by means of vector quantization.

A new bandwidth extension technology for MPEG Unified Speech and Audio Coding

Amplitude, phase and frequency of a sine wave to be generated are calculated on the basis of feature quantity s 1 delivered to feature quantity detecting means ( 2 ), and are sent to initialization means ( 3 ). The initialization means ( 3 ) calculates first two points of the sine wave to send the points thus calculated to oscillator (sine wave generating means) ( 4 ) as initial value s 4 . The oscillator ( 4 ) sequentially calculates values of respective sample points of waveform by using recurrence formula in accordance with initial value or values instructed from the initialization means ( 3 ) to thereby generate a sine wave signal. Thus, sine wave generation is performed without performing modulo-addressing.

Waveform generating device and method, and decoder

An encoding apparatus in which an input speech signal is divided on the block basis and encoded in terms of the resulting block as a unit. The encoding apparatus includes an encoding unit 120 for performing CELP encoding having a noise codebook 121 is made up of a code vector generated on clipping said Gaussian noise and a codebook vector obtained by learning using the codebook vector generated by clipping the Gaussian noise as initial values. The encoding apparatus enables optimum encoding for a variety of speech configurations.

Speech encoding method and apparatus

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To enable excellent detection of sound to be detected such as operating status sound emitted from a home appliance.SOLUTION: A sound detector extracts a feature quantity at every prescribed time from an input time signal. Whenever the feature quantity is newly extracted, the detector compares each line of the extracted feature quantities with each feature quantity line of a specific held number of sounds to be detected, and obtains a result of detecting the specific number of sounds to be detected. The detector obtains a likelihood distribution of tone likelihood from a time frequency distribution of the input time signal, and extracts the feature quantity at every prescribed time from a likelihood distribution after smoothing the obtained likelihood distribution in frequency and time directions. The detector can accurately detect the sound to be detected (such as operating status sound emitted from a home electric appliance), independently of an installation position of a microphone or the like.

Sound detector, sound detection method, sound feature quantity detector, sound feature quantity detection method, sound section detector, sound section detection method and program

Masayuki Nishiguchi

Papers

Method and apparatus for reproducing speech signals, method and apparatus for decoding the speech, method and apparatus for synthesizing the speech and portable radio terminal apparatus

A new bandwidth extension technology for MPEG Unified Speech and Audio Coding

Waveform generating device and method, and decoder

Speech encoding method and apparatus

Sound detector, sound detection method, sound feature quantity detector, sound feature quantity detection method, sound section detector, sound section detection method and program