Patent ID: 8521537

Claim:
A computer-driven method to regulate a speaker's issuance of speech based commands, the method comprising operations of: receiving an input signal representing audio content including speech of the speaker, the audio content occurring between a prescribed begin event and a prescribed end event; processing at least a portion of the input signal to determine whether the processed portion of the input signal contains speech exhibiting one or more predetermined conditions capable of posing difficulty in successfully performing speech recognition upon the input signal; where the processed portion of the input signal comprises one of: all of the input signal, a part of the input signal, speech present in the input signal; if the processing operation determines that the processed portion of the input signal contains speech exhibiting one or more of the predetermined conditions, then performing operations comprising: issuing at least one human comprehensible speech quality alert corresponding to each exhibited predetermined condition; the processing operation comprising: determining whether the speaker was speaking too loudly relative to prescribed criteria; the operation of determining whether the speaker was speaking too loudly relative to prescribed criteria comprising: computing a non-silent-frame-count by computing a total number of frames of the input signal with acoustic energy above a first threshold; computing a loud-frame-count by computing a total number of frames of the input signal with acoustic energy above a second threshold higher than the first threshold; computing a ratio between the loud-frame-count and the non-silent-frame-count; determining whether the ratio exceeds a third threshold, and if so, concluding that the speaker was speaking too loudly relative to the prescribed criteria.