{
  "patent_number": "US 11514901",
  "country": "US",
  "title": "How Voice Assistants Recognize Who is Talking",
  "original_title": "Anchored speech detection and speech recognition",
  "summary": "This patent describes a system that uses a recorded voice sample to identify if new speech comes from the same person, allowing voice assistants to only respond to specific users.",
  "what_it_does": "The system first captures a sample of a user's voice, called \"first audio data,\" during an initial setup or when a wake word is spoken (Claim 1). From this, it creates a unique \"reference feature vector\" that represents that user's voice (Claim 1). Later, when new \"second audio data\" comes in, the system compares it against this stored reference using a \"trained model,\" like a neural network (Claim 1). It then figures out which parts of the new audio match the original speaker and which do not. For example, if a child says \"Alexa, play music\" and then the parent says \"Alexa, stop,\" the system would identify the parent's voice as matching the reference and execute the \"stop\" command, while ignoring the child's voice if it doesn't match the reference. It only processes commands from the recognized speaker, \"excluding\" other voices (Claim 1).",
  "what_it_does_not_cover": [
    "Does not cover systems that identify any speaker, only those that compare against a pre-determined reference speaker.",
    "Does not cover systems that authenticate a speaker using a password or passphrase, as it focuses on voice characteristics.",
    "Does not cover ignoring speech based on content (e.g., profanity filters), only based on speaker identity.",
    "Does not cover systems that perform speech recognition on all incoming audio regardless of speaker, as it specifically \"excludes\" non-matching speech from command processing."
  ],
  "filed": "2019-06-11",
  "granted": "2022-11-29",
  "expires": "2039-06-11",
  "status": "active",
  "holder": "Amazon Technologies",
  "holder_url": "https://patentbrief.org/company/amazon-technologies",
  "inventors": [
    {
      "name": "Roland Maas",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/roland-maas"
    },
    {
      "name": "Sree Hari Krishnan Parthasarathi",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/sree-hari-krishnan-parthasarathi"
    },
    {
      "name": "Bjorn Hoffmeister",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/bjorn-hoffmeister"
    },
    {
      "name": "Brian King",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/brian-king"
    }
  ],
  "times_cited": 1,
  "tags": [
    "consumer_electronics",
    "software",
    "ai_ml",
    "telecommunications"
  ],
  "abstract": "A system configured to process speech commands may classify incoming audio as desired speech, undesired speech, or non-speech. Desired speech is speech that is from a same speaker as reference speech. The reference speech may be obtained from a configuration session or from a first portion of input speech that includes a wakeword. The reference speech may be encoded using a recurrent neural network (RNN) encoder to create a reference feature vector. The reference feature vector and incoming audio data may be processed by a trained neural network classifier to label the incoming audio data (for example, frame-by-frame) as to whether each frame is spoken by the same speaker as the reference speech. The labels may be passed to an automatic speech recognition (ASR) component which may allow the ASR component to focus its processing on the desired speech.",
  "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11514901/anchored-speech-detection-and-speech-recognition",
  "markdown_url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11514901/anchored-speech-detection-and-speech-recognition/md",
  "google_patents_url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US11514901",
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      "patentNumber": "10276149",
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    {
      "patentNumber": "9965247",
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    {
      "patentNumber": "11062694",
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      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11062694/text-to-speech-processing-with-emphasized-output-audio"
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  ]
}