DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
This action is in response to the communication filed on May 10, 2024.
Claims 1-20 are pending in this action.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to a judicial exception (i.e., law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea) without significantly more. The claim(s) recite(s) an abstract idea of processing audio signal. The claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the claims directed to an abstract idea of processing audio signal. The claim is drawn to process (a series of steps or acts) that similar to an idea ‘Of itself such as an instantiated concept, plan or scheme, as well as a mental process (thinking) that “can be performed in the human mind, or by a human using a pen and paper’.
The claim does not require that the method be implemented by a particular machine. The method does not require a particular transformation of a particular article. There is not transformation of a physical objects or data into a different state or thing. This processing audio signal is similar to delivering user-selected media content to a portable devices found by the courts to be abstract idea (Affinity Labs of Tex., LLC v. Amazon.com Inc., 120 USPQ2d 1210 (Fed. Cir. 2016)) and also displaying certain results of the collection and analysis found by the courts to be abstract idea (Elec. Power Grp., LLC v. Alstom S.A., 119 USPQ2d 1739 (Fed. Cir. 2016).
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because claims broadly recites the result (processing audio signal, determining registered audio information associated with a user, extracting a second audio signal ..), rather than sufficiently claiming a technical means of achieving the result. See Two-Way Media Ltd. v. Comcast Cable Commons, LLC, 874 F.3d 1329, 1337 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (“The claim requires the functional results ... but does not sufficiently describe how to achieve these results in a non-abstract way.”).
The claims recite a Judicial exception relating to “processing audio signal”. Here the claims do not change the underlying or other technology, rather the claimed techniques playing using computing device as pedagogical tool. The claimed additional elements - -electronic device - -“merely use an electronic device as a tool to perform an abstract idea” or “do no more than generally link the use of a judicial exception to a particular technological environment.” Memorandum, 84 Fed. Reg. at 55; see Customedia Techs., LLC v. Dish Network Corp., No. 2018- 2239, 2020 WL 1069742, at *3 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 6, 2020) (“We have held that it is not enough, however, to merely improve a fundamental practice or abstract process by invoking a computer merely as a tool.”).
Accordingly, claims 1-20 do not integrate the judicial exception into a practical application. See Memorandum, 84 Fed. Reg. at 54. As the claim recites a judicial exception and fails to integrate the exception into a practical application, the claim is “directed to the .. . judicial exception.” Id. at 54.
The claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the additional elements are simply a generic electronic apparatus. The claim amounts to no more than processing audio signal. Taking the claimed elements either individually or as ordered combination, that transform claims into patent-eligible application, since claims merely recite use of already existing electronic apparatus-based playing processing acoustic processing, and there is no “inventive concept” in play using electronic device well- understood, routine, and conventional activities commonly used in industry of teaching, since claims, at most, attempt to limit abstract idea to particular technological environment, and such limitation has been held insufficient to save claims in this context, and since dependent claims are not rendered patent-eligible by recitation of additional steps, such as predicting registered information from an air conduction signal; update or not to update the registered audio information, obtaining a mask corresponding to the user, even though additional limitations may narrow scope of claims. The claim as a whole does not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea itself. Accordingly, claims 1-20, are ineligible.
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) 1-4, 15-17, and 20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Xu et al. (WO 2022/199405).
As per claim 1, Xu discloses, a method performed by an electronic apparatus comprising:
determining registered audio information associated with a user based on a bone conduction (BC) signal (Specification correspond to Fig. 3, bone conduction microphone collects voice information);
extracting a second audio signal corresponding to the user from a first audio signal based on the registered audio information associated with the user (Summary of the invention, “perform feature extraction on the first voice component to obtain a first voiceprint feature, and calculate a first similarity between the first voiceprint feature and the user's first registered voiceprint feature”); and
processing the at least one from among the extracted second audio signal and a portion of the first audio signal which does not contain the second audio signal (Summary of the invention, “the terminal performs feature extraction on the second voice component to obtain a second voiceprint feature, and the terminal calculates a second similarity between the second voiceprint feature and the second registered voiceprint feature of the user, and the second registered voiceprint feature is the second registered voice Obtained through feature extraction by the second voiceprint model, the second registered voiceprint feature is used to reflect the user's preset audio features collected by the out-of-ear voice sensor. Voiceprint recognition is performed by calculating the similarity, which can improve the accuracy of voiceprint recognition”).
As per claim 2, Xu discloses, wherein the determining of the registered audio information associated with the user based on the BC signal comprises: evaluating a quality of a previously-extracted second audio signal based on content of the previously-extracted second audio signal and the BC signal; and determining the registered audio information associated with the user based on the quality of the previously-extracted second audio signal (Summary of the invention).
As per claim 3, Xu discloses, wherein the evaluating of the quality of the previously-extracted second audio signal comprises: classifying the previously-extracted second audio signal and the BC signal based on a voice feature; determining a matching probability between a category of the previously-extracted second audio signal and a category of the BC signal; and evaluating the quality of the previously-extracted second audio signal based on the matching probability (Specification description of Fig. 7).
As per claim 4, Xu discloses, wherein the classifying of the previously-extracted second audio signal and the BC signal based on the voice feature comprises classifying the previously-extracted second audio signal and the BC signal using a pre-trained classifier, and wherein the determining of the matching probability between the category of the previously-extracted second audio signal and the category of the BC signal comprises performing a lookup based on a matching probability graphic obtained by pre-training for the category of the previously-extracted second audio signal and the category of the BC signal to determine the matching probability (Specification description of Fig. 7).
As per claims 15-17 and 20, they are analyzed and thus rejected for the same reasons set forth in the rejection of claims 1-4, because corresponding claims have similar limitations.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 9-12 and 19 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Xu et al. (WO 2022/199405) as applied to claims 1 above, and further in view of Qiang et al. (CN 115966218, provided by Applicant).
As per claims 9-12 and 19. Xu does not disclose, but Qiang discloses, -wherein the extracting of the second audio signal corresponding to the user from the first audio signal based on the registered audio information associated with the user comprises: obtaining a feature of the first audio signal; obtaining a mask corresponding to the user based on the registered audio information associated with the user and the feature of the first audio signal; and extracting the second audio signal based on the mask and the feature of the first audio signal (Abstract).
-wherein the obtaining of the mask corresponding to the user based on the registered audio information associated with the user and the feature of the first audio signal comprises: obtaining the mask corresponding to the user, based on the registered audio information associated with the user, the feature of the first audio signal, and a feature of the BC signal, using a fourth AI model (Abstract).
-wherein the obtaining of the feature of the first audio signal comprises: performing a feature extraction on the first audio signal to obtain a first frequency domain feature; performing frequency band dividing on the first frequency domain feature to obtain a plurality of sub-frequency domain features corresponding to a plurality of sub-bands of the first audio signal; and performing feature encoding on the plurality of sub-frequency domain features to obtain a plurality of first features corresponding to the plurality of the sub-bands of the first audio signal as the feature of the first audio signal (Abstract).
-wherein the extracting of the second audio signal based on the mask and the feature of the first audio signal comprises: obtaining a plurality of second features corresponding to a plurality of sub-bands of the second audio signal based on a plurality of sub-masks in the mask corresponding to the plurality of sub-bands of the first audio signal and the plurality of first features; performing feature decoding on the plurality of second features to obtain a plurality of second frequency domain features corresponding to the plurality of sub-bands of the second audio signal; performing frequency band merging on the plurality of second frequency domain features; and obtaining the second audio signal based on the merged plurality of second frequency domain features (Abstract).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Xu by including obtained mask corresponding to user as claimed as taught by Qiang for the advantage of saving calculation power and storage space, voice signal enhancement ca be realized with respectively small-time delay (Abstract).
Claim(s) 13-14 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Xu et al. (WO 2022/199405) as applied to claims 1 above, and further in view of Zhao et al. (CN 113411698, provided by applicant).
As per claims 13-14, Xu does not disclose, but Zhao discloses, -wherein the processing of the at least one from among the extracted second audio signal and the portion of the first audio signal comprises at least one of: amplifying the at least one from among the extracted second audio signal and the portion of the first audio signal, and mixing the extracted second audio signal with a third audio signal (Abstract).
-wherein the amplifying of the at least one from among the extracted second audio signal and the portion of the first audio signal comprises: amplifying the extracted second audio signal and the portion of the first audio signal in different proportions (Abstract).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Xu by including amplifying the extracted audio signal as claimed as taught by Zhao for the advantage of audio playing and voice communication quality of the intelligent sound box is improved (Abstract).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Lovchinsky et al. (US 2023/0254650) discloses, system and method for enhancing speech of target speaker from audio signal in an ear-worn device using voice signatures.
Forte (US 2017/0337933) discloses, noise reduction methodology for wearable devices employing multitude of sensors.
Contact Information
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Abul K. Azad whose telephone number is (571) 272-7599. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner's supervisor, Bhavesh Mehta, can be reached at (571) 272-7453.
Any response to this action should be mailed to:
Commissioner for Patents
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, VA 22313-1450
Or faxed to: (571) 273-8300.
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December 18, 2025
/ABUL K AZAD/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2656
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