Patent ID: 8130978

Claim:
A method performed at a computing device to identify a direction of a source of speech sounds relative to an array of directional microphones, the method comprising: receiving, at the computing device, a set of audio streams from directional microphones in the array of directional microphones, the array of directional microphones comprising at least two directional microphones; automatically identifying, at the computing device, the direction of the source of the speech sounds using the audio streams from the directional microphones in a first subgroup of the directional microphones when it is more likely that the direction of the source of the speech sounds will be correctly identified using the audio streams from the first subgroup of the directional microphones than the audio streams from any other subgroup of the directional microphones and when it is more likely that the direction of the source of the speech sounds will be correctly identified using the audio streams from the first subgroup of the directional microphones than the audio streams from all of the directional microphones; and automatically identifying, at the computing device, the direction of the source of the speech sounds using the audio streams from all of the directional microphones when it is more likely that the direction of the source of the speech sounds will be correctly identified using the audio streams from all of the directional microphones than the audio streams from any subgroup of the directional microphones.