Newsgroups: comp.speech Path: pavo.csi.cam.ac.uk!pipex!uunet!world!srctran From: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) Subject: Speech software patents from 1992/93 Message-ID: Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Date: Tue, 4 Jan 1994 03:54:13 GMT Lines: 194 TITLES TO 2700 SOFTWARE PATENTS ISSUED IN 1992 and 1993 Greg Aharonian Internet Patent News Service P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178 patents@world.std.com 617-489-3727 In January and February, the Patent Office is holding hearings in San Jose and Washington on the "problem" of software patents. The hearings will focus on two aspects: the nature of software patents (legal, economic and software theory), and the process of awarding software patents (in particular, software prior art). To help these hearings be more empirical, I have prepared a list of 2700 software patents issued in the past two years. It should help people base assertions in the actual statistics of issued software patents (of which there are over 11,000). The patents listed below were issued in all of 1992 and the first half of 1993. The list is based on what I consider to be a software patent, though it does reflect the nature of software patenting in the US, and does include software patents from all categories of software for which patents are being sought. And given the Patent Office's classification scheme for software (which they are revising), this was not a very easy list to compile. Despite the tremendous numbers of software patents being issued (with respect to the small numbers of true software innovations each year), software patenting as of yet is not a really big socioeconomic problem, though unless the software community acts now, it will become a big problem. A series of diskettes with more detailed information on each software patent listed below (full title, number, assignee, abstract, classification, application date) are available for $595. Also provided are diskettes with 9000 titles from my software prior art database, and version 1.0 of my patents claim analysis program. Proceeds go to my project of making the Patent Office APS patent text files Internet accessible. For more information on the Internet Patent News Service, send 'help' in the body of a message to patents@world.std.com on the Internet. ============================================================================== I use 42 categories of software patents, listed below, though a few are so big that I will probably split them up. Some patents are listed in more than one category to simplify your search for relevant patents. Many of the titles have been abridged without losing their meaning, to fit on one line. Some titles start with '--'. This indicates the assignee is IBM. I do this because IBM has 1/8 of all software patents, has made money off its software patents, and it is interesting to see their software patenting strategy. IMAGE PROCESSING OPERATING SYSTEMS NETWORKING and COMMUNICATIONS PROCESS CONTROL and NUMERICAL CONTROL GRAPHICS GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACES DATABASE WORD PROCESSING and DOCUMENT HANDLING FINANCIAL COMPUTER AIDED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and EXPERT SYSTEMS ENGINEERING CIRCUIT DESIGN / COMPUTER AIDED ENGINEERING NEURAL NETWORKS SECURITY AND ENCRYPTION MULTIPROCESSING PATTERN RECOGNITION MEDICAL AND HEALTH SIGNAL PROCESSING SPEECH RECOGNITION and SYNTHESIS COMPRESSION NUMERICAL ANALYSIS COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN AUTOMOBILE OFFICE AUTOMATION GEOPHYSICAL NATURAL LANGUAGE ANALYSIS CHARACTER RECOGNITION PARALLEL PROCESSING BIOLOGY VISION DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING ALGORITHMS and DATA STRUCTURES OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING ROBOTICS FUZZY LOGIC SIMULATION EDUCATION PHYSICS CHEMISTRY SPREADSHEETS VIRTUAL REALITY What follows are the speech patents. The full list is being posted to comp.software-eng, misc.legal.computing, misc.int-property. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SPEECH RECOGNITION and SYNTHESIS Inspection control system and method Method for recognizing N different word strings in a speech signal Processing a speech signal with estimated pitch Methods for speech quantization and error correction Grammar-based checksum constraints for speech recognition --Speech recognition using a speech coder outputting acoustic prototype ranks Speech synthesis apparatus and method Extracting a speech signal from a noisy speech signal Method of speech recognition Keyword recognition using template concantenation model Voiced/unvoiced estimation of an acoustic signal Time scale modification of speech signals Real-time interactive conversational toy Machine-based learning system Providing sentence-final accents in synthesized American English speech Voice recognition of proper names using text-derived recognition models Speech recognition based on subsyllable spellings Encoding method for syllables Text-to-speech synthesizer with formant-rule/speech-parameter synthesis modes Vector quantization method employing mirrored input vectors to search codebook Large-vocabulary continuous speech prefiltering and processing system Phoneme discrimination method Distinguishing or counting spoken itemized expressions Wordspotting for voice editing and indexing Distinguishing between voiced and unvoiced speech elements Speech coder having spectral interpolation and fast codebook search --Grouping utterances of a phoneme into context-dependent categories Training module for estimating mixture Gaussian densities for speech-unit models in speech recognition systems Pattern matching system for speech recognition system Voice interactive computer system Language and speaker recognition --Speaker-independent label coding apparatus Automation of telephone operator assistance calls Digital dictation system Harmonic speech coding where a set of parameters for a continuous magnitude spectrum is determined by a speech analyzer Speech recognition using neural network and fuzzy logic Integrated voice messaging / voice response system Automobile navigation system using real time spoken driving instructions Method of speaker adaptive speech recognition Temporal decorrelation method for robust speaker verification Speaker recognition in a telephone switching system Speech synthesis using perceptual linear prediction parameters --Feneme-cased Markov models for words Recognizing spoken words by feature extraction/comparison with reference words Pitch control in artifical speech Speech word recognizing apparatus using information indicative of the relative significance of speech features Generating speech from digitally stored coarticulated speech segments Utilizing formant frequencies in speech recognition Speech recognition apparatus including speaker-independent dictionary Reducing the search complexity in analysis-by-synthesis coding Speech recognition apparatus of speaker adaptation type Vocabulary partitioned speech recognition apparatus Speech recognition system utilizing both a long-term strategic and short-term scoring operation in a transition network thereof Speech recognition wherein decisions are made based on phonemes Voice recognition method by analyzing syllables Speech recognition having dynamic reference pattern adaptation Recognizing alphanumeric strings spoken over a telephone network Speech recognition AI pattern-recognition-based noise reduction system for speech processing Rejection method for speech recognition Identification of voice patterns The recognition of voice signal encoded as time encoded speech Speech recognition method and apparatus Facsimile-to-speech system Continuous speech recognition apparatus Phase synthesis for speech processing ============================================================================== WHERE TO SEND YOUR COMMENTS ABOUT SOFTWARE PATENTS Those interested in presenting written comments on the topics presented in the supplementary information, or any other related topics, should address their comments to the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, marked to the attention of Jeff Kushan. Comments submitted by mail should be sent to Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, Box 4, Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, DC 20231. Comments may also be submitted by telefax at (703) 305-8885 and by electronic mail through the Internet to comments-software@uspto.gov. Written comments should include the following information: - name and affiliation of the individual responding; - an indication of whether comments offered represent views of the individual's organization or are the respondent's personal views; and - if applicable, the nature of the respondent's organization, including the size, type of organization (e.g., business, trade group, university, non-profit organization) and principal areas of business or software development activity.