DETAILED ACTION
This action is in response to the application filed on May 13th, 2024. Claims 1-20 are pending and have been examined.
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 .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 6, 13, and 20 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claims 6, 13, and 20 each recite the limitation "the first fragment of audio feature information" in the preamble. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim. As such, it is unclear whether the limitation is referring to the “first audio feature information” of each “first target audios”, the first occurring “first audio feature information” of the “first target audios”, a first fragment of the “first audio feature information”, or another element of the claims.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-20 contain subject matter not found during the prior art search. As such, claims 1-5, 7-12, and 14-20 are allowable, and claims 6, 13, and 20 would be allowable if amended to overcome the current rejection under 35 U.S.C. 112.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
Regarding claim 1, the prior art search did not yield any references that disclosed the limitation “obtaining target audio feature information of the target audio by concatenating all of the first audio feature information in a case that the duration of the target audio is less than or equal to a second preset duration, wherein the second preset duration is greater than the first preset duration” before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, nor any references that would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to have combined to yield the abovementioned limitation before the effective filing date of the claimed invention. As such, especially in combination with the other limitations of claim 1, claim 1 is found to contain allowable subject matter.
Regarding claims 8 and 15, the claims recite limitations comparable to claim 1, and thus contain allowable subject matter for the same reasons as stated above with regards to claim 1.
Regarding claims 2-7, 9-14, and 16-20, each of these claims depends on one of the independent claims discussed above, or on another dependent claim, and therefore incorporates all limitations therefrom. As such, claims 2-7, 9-14, and 16-20 contain allowable subject matter for at least the same reasons as stated above with regards to claims 1, 8, and 15.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Shin, Dongchan (US Pat. No. 11,972,752 B2) discloses a method for detecting speech segment from audio considering length of speech segment.
Hornsby et al. (US Pat. Pub. No. 2021/0067836 A1) discloses a subtitle splitter.
Knighton et al. (US Pat. No. 9,571,638 B1) discloses a method for segment-based queueing for audio captioning.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to TYLER J BECKER whose telephone number is (703)756-1271. The examiner can normally be reached M-Th, 7:15am-5:45pm PT.
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/TYLER BECKER/ Examiner, Art Unit 2657
/DANIEL C WASHBURN/ Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2657