Patent ID: 7302381

Claim:
A method comprising: creating a rule-based grammar having a wildcard identifier in place of a predefined category of words; defining rules to produce artificial combinations of unique sounds in a language, where each artificial combination represents a pronunciation of the words in the predefined category, and represents a generic word that is defined in a speech engine's vocabulary database; generating a set of artificial combinations of unique sounds by substituting the wildcard identifier with the rules; and in response to human speech specifying a wildcard word, determining a set of potential words spoken by the user by finding the generic words and non-generic words that phonetically match the wildcard word, wherein the non-generic words are not part of the rule-based grammar, assigning each of the generic and non-generic words a confidence level based on a set of rules followed by the speech engine, wherein the generic and non-generic words that are part of a particular application are assigned a higher confidence level than the generic and non-generic words that are not part of the particular application, removing the generic words from the set of potential words spoken by the user, and selecting a remaining non-generic word from the set of potential words spoken by the user having a highest confidence level.