Patent ID: 6931376

Claim:
A method of notifying a speech related application of events generated by a speech related engine, comprising: receiving a notification selection and an interest indication from the application at a middleware component between the application and the engine, the notification selection being indicative of a selected notification mechanism, selected by the application, for notifying the application of the events, the interest indication being indicative of events generated by the engine for which the application is to receive notification; initializing a notification assistance component to notify the application according to the selected notification mechanism; receiving an event indication including an event identifier from the engine, the event indication being indicative of an event generated by the engine; transferring the event indication from the middleware component to an output device that processes a data stream containing the event, and when the output device reaches a predetermined distance from the event in the data stream, notifying the middleware component; transferring the event indication back to the middleware component; notifying the application of the event indication from the middleware component according to the selected notification mechanism by transferring the event indication to the notification assistance component and notifying the application from the notification assistance component of the event indication; receiving a request from the application at the middleware component for the event identifier; and transferring the event identifier from the middleware component to the application.