Patent ID: 8812326

Claim:
A computer implemented 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 at a microphone, 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 microphone is too near or too far on the basis of a near field effect, wherein low-frequency responsiveness of the microphone to the speaker varies with distance between the speaker and the microphone; wherein as separation of the speaker and the microphone increases, the amount of low-frequency acoustic energy captured by the microphone decreases, with respect to the total amount of acoustic energy captured from the speaker.