Patent ID: 8370142

Claim:
A system for transcribing a conference call among a plurality of participants using a plurality of audio connections; the system comprising: (a) a plurality of capture mechanisms, each one of the plurality of capture mechanisms capturing a portion of audio associated with one of the plurality of audio connections, wherein each one of the plurality of capture mechanisms comprises a voice activity detector for detecting a voice snippet included in the portion of audio, the length of the voice snippet being determined by detecting a break in the portion of audio, and means for capturing the voice snippet; (b) a plurality of speech recognition instances for converting audio to text, each one of the plurality of speech recognition instances having substantially the same capability; (c) a dispatcher for forwarding a first captured portion of audio from a selected one of the plurality of capture mechanisms to a first one of the plurality of speech recognition instances, and for forwarding a second captured portion of audio from the selected one of the plurality of capture mechanisms to a second one of the plurality of speech recognition instances when the first one of the plurality of speech recognition instances is processing the first captured portion of audio, wherein the second captured portion of audio is subsequent to the first captured portion of audio; and (d) a combiner for re-assembling the text converted by the first one of the plurality of speech recognition instances and the text converted by the second one of the plurality of speech recognition instances from captured portions of audio from the plurality of capture mechanisms.