DETAILED ACTION
Introduction
1. This office action is in response to Applicant's submission filed on 01/31/2025. The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA . Claims 1-20 are currently pending and examined below.
Drawings
2. The drawings filed on 01/31/2025 have been accepted and considered by the Examiner.
Information Disclosure Statement
3. The Information Statements (IDSs) filed on 01/31/2025, 09/11/2025 have been accepted/considered/in-compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97.
Priority
4. The Applicants priority to Korean Patent Application # 10-2024-0016657, filed on February 2, 2024, has been accepted and considered in this office action.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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 –
(2) The claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
5. Claims 1 and 19-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102 (a) (2) as being anticipated by Kim (U.S. Patent Application Publication # 2024/0257824 A1).
With regards to claim 1, Kim teaches a device including an on-device artificial intelligence (Al) comprising an input module configured to receive sensing data associated with a plurality of utterances from a plurality of speakers (Paragraphs 19-21 and figure 1, teach a voice processing system including a voice processing apparatus for generating voice signals corresponding to voices of speaker SPK1 to SPK4 and outputting the generated voice signals, and a user terminal for receiving the voice signals output from the voice processing apparatus. This apparatus includes a microphone capable of converting voices into electrical signals);
and a processor configured to perform Al processing to interpret an utterance of the plurality of utterances into a target language (Para 27, teaches that the voice processing apparatus provides translation of the voice of each of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4, i.e., the voice processing apparatus determines a source language and a target language for translating the voice of each of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4 and provide the translation for the language of each of the speakers using the separation voice signal);
wherein the processor is configured to preprocess the plurality of utterances (Para 25, teaches that the voice processing apparatus generates the separation voice signals associated with the voices of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4 positioned at the positions P1 to P4 based on the sound source positions of the voices corresponding to the voice signals);
classify each preprocessed utterance of the preprocessed plurality of utterances to a speaker of the plurality of speakers (Para 26, teaches that the voice processing apparatus transmits the separate voice signal associated with each of the voices of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4 to the user terminal. The voice processing apparatus transmits the separation voice signal associated with each of the voices of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4 and sound source position information representing the corresponding sound source position to the user terminal);
extract an utterance of a specific speaker of the plurality of speakers from the classified plurality of utterances (Para 23, teaches that the voice processing apparatus determines a sound source position of each of the voices of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4 using the voice signals associated with the voices of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4 and perform sound source separation based on the sound source position, and thus extract the separation voice signal associated with the voice of each of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4 from the voice signal);
interpret the utterance of the specific speaker into the target language (Para 27, teaches that the voice processing apparatus provides translation of the voice of each of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4, i.e., the voice processing apparatus determines a source language and a target language for translating the voice of each of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4 and provide the translation for the language of each of the speakers using the separation voice signal);
and output the utterance of the specific speaker in the target language (Para 28, teaches that the voice processing apparatus outputs the translation result for each of the voices. The translation result may be text data or a voice signal associated with the voice of each of the speakers SPK1 to SPK4 expressed in the target language).
With regards to claim 19, this is an interpretation device claim for the corresponding device claim 1. These two claims are related as interpretation device and device of using the same, with each claimed interpretation device element's function corresponding to the claimed device step. Accordingly, claim 19 is similarly rejected under the same rationale as applied above with respect to device claim 1.
With regards to claim 20, this is a method claim for the corresponding device claim 1. These two claims are related as method and device of using the same, with each claimed method element's function corresponding to the claimed device step. Accordingly, claim 20 is similarly rejected under the same rationale as applied above with respect to device claim 1.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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.
6. Claim 2 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Kim in view of Narita (U.S. Patent Application Publication # 2012/0020489 A1).
With regards to claim 2, Kim may not explicitly detail the limitation wherein preprocessing the plurality of utterances comprises analyzing a frequency corresponding to the plurality of utterances and removing a noise frequency. This is taught by Narita (Abstract and para 7, teach a directivity control unit that calculates a main beam signal with its directivity turned toward an object sound direction and a sub-beam signal with its blind spot turned toward the object sound direction from output signals of a plurality of microphones through signal processing, and a frequency analyzing unit converts them to spectra. A sound source decision unit decides on whether a sound source is voice, stationary noise or unstationary noise from the spectra of the main beam signal and sub-beam signal and outputs as a sound source decision result and calculates the average spectrum which is a statistic of noise for the main beam signal. An interfering sound removing unit subtracts the average spectrum from the spectrum of the main beam signal to remove interfering sounds);
Kim and Narita can be considered analogous art as they belong to a similar field of endeavor in speech processing. It would thus have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art to advantageously combine the teachings of Narita (Use of frequency based noise removal) with those of Kim (Use of target speaker based language translation) so as to provide improved the noise cancellation capacity by making the power difference more distinct by comparing emphasized object sounds with interfering sounds in which the object sounds are suppressed by controlling the directivity by signal processing of the output signals of the plurality of microphones (Narita, para 6).
7. Claim 3 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Kim in view of Gainsborough (U.S. Patent Application Publication # 2011/0082874 A1).
With regards to claim 3, Kim may not explicitly detail the limitation wherein classifying each preprocessed utterance comprises extracting voice features of the preprocessed plurality of utterances, identifying the plurality of speakers for the preprocessed plurality of utterances based on the extracted voice features, and classifying the preprocessed plurality of utterances by the identified plurality of speakers. This is taught by Gainsborough (Para 18, teaches spectrographic analysis to extract key features of different people's voices. Paragraphs 107-108, teach the concept of speaker identification by cohort speakers wherein persons whose voices get classified into one of a plurality of classifications are sometimes referred to as "cohort speakers);
Kim and Gainsborough can be considered analogous art as they belong to a similar field of endeavor in speech processing. It would thus have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art to advantageously combine the teachings of Gainsborough (Use of frequency based speaker classification and identification) with those of Kim (Use of target speaker based language translation) so as to save time searching for speaker's identity, by comparing a small region of one speaker's speech-feature space with like region of another speaker's speech-feature space, rather than doing an exhaustive comparison of the entire feature space (Gainsborough, para 108).
8. Claim 8 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Kim in view of Jeon (U.S. Patent Application Publication # 2012/0095764 A1).
With regards to claim 8, Kim may not explicitly detail the limitation wherein the processor is configured to select the specific speaker, wherein selecting the specific speaker comprises generating and providing a speaker list corresponding to the plurality of speakers, and selecting the specific speaker as a result of receiving a user input for selecting at least one speaker included in the speaker list. This is taught by Jeon (Para 69, teaches a linear search block that compares, using one of the novel utterance comparison equations, the query utterance statistics to utterance statistics extracted from the utterances in the database of speakers to generate the list of speakers having highest similarity to the query speaker. As this list is rank ordered, the topmost speaker in this list is being interpreted as the “at least one speaker included in the speaker list”);
Kim and Jeon can be considered analogous art as they belong to a similar field of endeavor in speech processing. It would thus have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art to advantageously combine the teachings of Jeon (Use of speaker list and speaker selection from a list of speakers) with those of Kim (Use of target speaker based language translation) so as to provide acceptable speed and accuracy to speaker diarization and speaker search method of Kim (Jeon, paragraphs 2-4).
8. Claim 8 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Kim in view of Mao (U.S. Patent Application Publication # 2023/0092702 A1).
With regards to claim 10, Kim may not explicitly detail the limitation wherein extracting the utterance of the specific speaker comprises removing utterances of the remaining speakers of the plurality of speakers excluding the specific speaker. This is taught by Mao (Para 91, teaches that once the semantically insignificant utterances by other speakers are removed from the conversation transcript, the remaining successive or consecutive utterances by an individual speaker may be combined into an individual utterance);
Kim and Mao can be considered analogous art as they belong to a similar field of endeavor in speech processing. It would thus have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art to advantageously combine the teachings of Mao (Removing speech by all other speakers except for the selected speaker) with those of Kim (Use of target speaker based language translation) because cleaning the conversation transcript by removing semantically insignificant terms, words, phrases or other utterances, allows the system to identify the utterance by the customer or other user that initiated the conversation that is most semantically similar to the conversation, and therefore, most likely to reflect the intent or contact reason for which the conversation was initiated (Mao, para 92).
Allowable Subject Matter
9. Claims 4-7, 9 and 11-18 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims. The prior art of record, alone or in combination, does not currently suggest or teach the invention as outlined in these claims. More detailed reasons for allowance will be outlined as and when the Application proceeds to allowability.
Conclusion
10. The following prior art, made of record but not relied upon, is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure: Badlani (U.S. Patent Application Publication # 2025/0118286 A1), Thomson (U.S. Patent Application Publication # 2020/0243094 A1). These references are also included in the PTO-892 form attached with this office action.
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Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to NEERAJ SHARMA whose contact information is given below. The examiner can normally be reached on Monday to Friday 8 am to 5 pm. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Pierre Louis-Desir can be reached on 571-272-7799 (Direct Phone). The fax number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
/NEERAJ SHARMA/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2659
571-270-5487 (Direct Phone)
571-270-6487 (Direct Fax)
neeraj.sharma@uspto.gov (Direct Email)
