U.S. Patent No. 10,096,319 B1 (‘319), issued on October 9, 2018, for “Voice-Based Determination of Physical and Emotional Characteristics of Users.” The inventors are Huafeng Jin of Sammamish, Washington and Shuo Wang of Bellevue, Washington. The applicant and assignee is Amazon Technologies, Inc. of Seattle, Washington, the giant e-commerce company which has transformed how people shop. The ‘319 specification describes various embodiments for the voice-based determination. The ‘319 claims are directed to the system and method for the voice-based determination of one’s physical and emotional characteristics, namely, through receiving voice into the system which then can algorithimically determine the user’s characteristic at the moment.
Figure 1 illustrates the method of this invention:
The Cooperative Patent Classification is G10L (speech analysis or synthesis; speech recognition; speech or voice processing; speech or audio coding or decoding, namely, procedures used during a speech recognition process, e.g., man-machine dialogue (15/22); distributed recognition, e.g., client-server systems (15/30); and speech or voice analysis techniques not restricted to a single group for estimating emotional state (25/63), for extracting parameters related to health conditions (25/66), and for discriminating voice from noise (25/84)).
This patent (and any related patents) presumably will be part of Amazon’s ALEXA® system, Amazon’s highly successful voice-activated Internet-based virtual assistant, as well as its ECHO® speaker product. There are a number of privacy issues with home-based assistant devices, and the method and system of the ‘319 patent are not going to assuage any of those concerns.
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