Patent ID: 8401840

Claim:
A language identification engine, comprising: a front-end module having an input configured to receive an audio stream that corresponds to at least one of a set of two or more candidate languages being spoken in the audio stream under analysis; a universal phoneme decoder that contains a universal phoneme set that 1) represents all phonemes occurring in the set of two or more candidate languages, and 2) captures phoneme correspondences across languages, such that a set of unique phoneme patterns and probabilities are calculated in order to identify a most likely phoneme occurring for phonemes in the audio stream in the set of two or more candidate languages; one or more statistical language models having logic configured to supply to a run-time language identifier module probabilities of how linguistically likely a particular uttered phoneme identified by the universal phoneme decoder comes from a particular candidate language based on an identified sequence of phonemes; wherein the run-time language identifier module identifies a particular human language being spoken in the received audio stream from the set of two or more candidate languages by utilizing the one or more statistical language models, which have been trained by the universal phoneme decoder; and wherein the modules making up the language identification engine are implemented in electronic circuitry, software coding, and any combination of the two, where portions implemented in software coding are stored in an executable format by a processor on a non-transitory machine-readable medium.