Patent ID: 7620547

Claim:
A method for operating a man-machine interface unit included in at least one of a home network system, a home entertainment system, and a service robot, the method comprising: receiving an utterance of a person; identifying the person on the basis of a previously computed speaker model as one of an unknown person and a known member of a predetermined group restricted to a predetermined, finite first number of members that have not undergone an enrollment process by speaking an enrollment text; determining, on the basis of a confidence measure measuring reliability of the identification, whether a clustering process is to be performed; including, if the clustering process is to be performed, the received utterance into a garbage class including at most a predetermined second number of most recently received utterances, and clustering the garbage class in an unsupervised manner with each of the included utterances forming an initial cluster by repeatedly merging most similar clusters until the remaining most similar clusters are more dissimilar than a predetermined threshold; computing a further speaker model from one of the clusters if the one of the clusters includes more than a predetermined third number of utterances, thereby deleting utterances of the one of the clusters from the garbage class; storing the further speaker model for identifying another person when receiving an utterance of the another person; associating a first submodel with a first user profile and a second submodel with a second user profile, the first and second user profiles including a user preference; determining a distance between the first submodel and the second submodel based on an acoustic distance and differences between the first user profile and the second user profile; splitting the speaker model into the first and the second submodel if the determined distance between the first and second submodel exceeds a predefined threshold; and operating the at least one of the home network system, the home entertainment system, and the service robot.