This invention relates to a system and method for interactive, adaptive, and individualized computer assisted instruction. This invention includes an agent (108) for each student (101) which adapts to its student, and provides individualized guidance to the student and controls to the augmented computer assisted instructional materials. The instructional materials of this invention are augmented to communicate the student's performance and the material's pedagogical characteristics to the agent, and to receive control from the agent. In a preferred embodiment, the agent maintains data reflecting the student's pedagogic or cognitive characteristics in a protected and portable media in the personal control of the student. Preferably, the content of the communication between the agent and the materials conforms to specified interface standards, so that the agent acts independently of the content of the particular materials. Also preferably, the agent can project using various I/O modalities integrated engaging, lifelike display personna(e).

Agent based instruction system and method

A television viewer interface system provides a viewer interface that allows the viewer to access different functions of a system. A highlight bar is responsive to the user's commands and is used to indicate the current menu item that can be selected by the user. Information is presented in a successive disclosure format where the user navigates through menus by moving the highlight bar to the right to obtain more information or to the left to see less information and return to the previous location. The background colors of each set of menus remains consistent throughout the user's experience such that the user intuitively knows what menu area he is in through the color cues. The invention provides indicators that tell the user that more information is available in a particular direction for a menu item.

Television viewer interface system

A global speech user interface (GSUI) comprises an input system to receive a user's spoken command, a feedback system along with a set of feedback overlays to give the user information on the progress of his spoken requests, a set of visual cues on the television screen to help the user understand what he can say, a help system, and a model for navigation among applications. The interface is extensible to make it easy to add new applications.

Global speech user interface

A natural language interface control system (206) for operating a plurality of devices (114) consists of a first microphone array (108), a feature extraction module (202) coupled to the first microphone array, and a speech recognition module (204) coupled to the feature extraction module, wherein the speech recognition module utilizes hidden Markov models. The system also comprises a natural language interface module (222) coupled to the speech recognition module (204) and a device interface (210) coupled to the natural language interface module (222), wherein the natural language interface module is for operating a plurality of devices coupled to the device interface based upon non-prompted, open-ended natural language requests from a user.

Natural language interface control system

In a language translation system, a method for providing a guide for a user. In one embodiment, the method comprises the steps of receiving (302) an input that is representative of at least one word in a source language, and generating (1402) at least one recognition hypothesis in the source language in response to the input. The method further comprises the steps of selecting (406) a best hypothesis from the at least one recognition hypothesis in the source language, presenting (408) the best hypothesis in the source language to a user, and presenting (408) alternatives to a portion of the best hypothesis in the source language to the user. The method further includes receiving (410) an indication of a choice of one of the alternatives from the user, and presenting (306) a revised version of the best hypothesis including the alternative chosen to the user.

A method and apparatus for interactive source language expression recognition and alternative hypothesis presentation and selection

An instruction of operation mode control of a VTR 40 and information on the video recording reservation is voice inputted. The voice input is recognized by a voice recognition circuit 13 and is fed to a control circuit 15. The control circuit 15 controls the VTR 40 in response to the instruction or information of the voice input and causes an animation character generating circuit 16 to generate a video image of an animation character AC for displaying it on the screen of a CRT display 30. A message of the animation character AC is voice synthesized in a voice synthesizing circuit 19 so that the synthesized voice is outputted from a speaker 20. The electronic equipment can be operated as if an user were talking with the animation character. A natural man-machine interface can be realized.

Control apparatus for electronic equipment

A bandwidth expanding method and apparatus in which frequency characteristics of high-frequency components of broad band signals can be adjusted to the liking of the user, overflow due to addition is prevented from occurring without power variations being perceived by a user, the number of broad band formants is reduced, and emphasis is attached to the rough structure of the spectrum, so that the produced broad band speech signals can be improved in quality. To this end, in a speech bandwidth expansion device, frequency characteristics of the frequency components not less than 3400 Hz are adjusted by preset alterable parameter values and summed to the original narrow band speech components. If overflow has occurred in a sample, the high-range gain of the sample is lowered to a level below the overflow level before proceeding to addition. Also, broad band autocorrelation γw is generated and inverse-transformed in an inverse parameter conversion unit to produce broad band linear prediction coefficient αW to synthesize the broad-band speech in a linear predictive coding synthesis unit.

Signal band expanding method and apparatus and signal synthesis method and apparatus

An encoding apparatus in which an input speech signal is divided into blocks and encoded in units of blocks. The encoding apparatus includes an encoding unit for performing CELP encoding having a noise codebook memory containing having codebook vectors generated by clipping Gaussian noise and codebook vectors obtained by learning using the code vectors generated by clipping the Gaussian noise as initial values. The encoding apparatus enables optimum encoding for a variety of speech configurations.

Apparatus and method for encoding/decoding a speech signal using adaptively changing codebook vectors

A method and apparatus for encoding an input signal, such as a broad-range speech signal, in which plural decoding operations with different bit rates is enabled for assuring a high encoding bit rate and for minimizing deterioration of the reproduced sound even with a low bit rate. The signal encoding method includes a band-splitting step for splitting an input signal into plurality of bands and a step of encoding signals of the bands in a different manner depending on signal characteristics of the bands. Specifically, a low-range side signal is taken out by a low-pass filter (LPF) 102 from an input signal entering a terminal 101, and analyzed for LPC by an LPC analysis quantization unit 130. After finding the LPC residuals, as short-term prediction residuals by an LPC inverted filter 111, the pitch is found by a pitch analysis circuit 115. Then, pitch residuals are found by long-term prediction by a pitch inverted filter 112. The pitch residuals are processed with MDCT by a modified DCT (MDCT) circuit 113 and vector-quantized by a vector-quantization (VQ) circuit 114. The resulting quantization indices are transmitted along with the pitch lag and the pitch gain. The linear spectral pairs (LSP) are also sent as parameter representing LPC coefficients.

Signal encoding method and apparatus

A method and apparatus for reproducing speech signals at a controlled speed and for synthesizing speech includes a dividing unit that divides the input speech into time segments and an encoding unit that discriminates whether each of the speech segments is voiced or unvoiced. Based on the results of the discrimination, the encoding unit performs sinusoidal synthesis and encoding for voiced segments and vector quantization by closed-loop search for an optimum vector using an analysis-by-synthesis method for unvoiced segments in order to find encoded parameters. A period modification unit modifies the length of time associated with each signal segment and calculates a set of modified encoded parameters. In the speech synthesizing unit, encoded speech signal data is output from the encoding unit and pitch data and amplitude data specifying the spectral envelope are sent via a data conversion unit to a waveform synthesis unit, where the number of amplitude data points of the spectral envelope is changed without changing the shape of the spectral envelope, so that the pitch of the signal may be varied without changing its phoneme. A waveform synthesis unit synthesizes the speech waveform based on the converted spectral envelope data and pitch data.

Shiro Omori

Papers

Control apparatus for electronic equipment

Signal band expanding method and apparatus and signal synthesis method and apparatus

Apparatus and method for encoding/decoding a speech signal using adaptively changing codebook vectors

Signal encoding method and apparatus

Method and apparatus for decoding and changing the pitch of an encoded speech signal