Patent ID: 6233559
Filing Date: 2001-05-15
Classification: G06F,G10L

Abstract:
A processor comprising:an input for receiving spoken commands;an operating system having an arbitrator;one or more applications each having a search applet, the one or more applications under the control of the operating system and modularly separate from the operating system;one or more vocabularies that may be called by the search applet, each of the one or more vocabularies having commands pertinent to one of each said applications; andone or more language models that may be called by the search applet, each of the one or more language models having language constraints pertinent to one of each said applications;the operating system comprising a speech recognizer for recognizing spoken commands and, based on the data found in the vocabularies and language models, obtaining a confidence level for recognition to enable the one or more applications to automatically present to the arbitrator recognition information indicative of the voice recognizer's ability to recognize the spoken commands, the arbitrator determining based on the confidence level which of the at least one or more applications is to respond to the spoken commands and permitting the determined application to act on the spoken command and instructing the remaining applications to ignore the spoken command the arbitrator further adapted to direct commands to one of the one or more applications based on whether the one application is in the foreground or in the background.