DETAILED ACTION
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-5, 10, 12, 16-20 are allowed.
Claim 7-9 and 21-23 would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 6 and 15 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Tammi US PG-Pub 2019/0394606.
Regarding claim 6 and 15, Tammi discloses an apparatus (Fig. 5A & Fig. 5B) comprising at least one processors and at least one non-transitory memory storing instructions that, when executed with the at least one processor, cause the apparatus at least to: obtain a first audio signal, a second audio signal, and at least one metadata directional parameter (Fig. 4: beamformer-405 output 1st and 2nd audio signal and spatial analyzer-403 outputs metadata); obtain a desired focus directional parameter (Fig. 4: audio focus activated-425); generate a focus audio signal towards the desired focus directional parameter value, the focus audio signal based on the desired focus directional parameter, the at least one metadata directional parameter, the first audio signals and the second audio signal (Fig. 4: using 1st, 2nd audio signal-442 from encoder-441 and spatial metadata-404 and using the desired focus directional parameter-425 will create a focus audio signal-446); and generate at least one output audio signal based on the focus audio signal (Fig. 4: passing the focus audio signal-446 through a spatial filter-447 to output a focused spatial audio).
Conclusion
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/WILLIAM A JEREZ LORA/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2695