Patent Document ID: 5566271
Application ID: 08228923

Base Claim:
1. A control apparatus for controlling electronic equipment and for designating and controlling an operation mode thereof, comprising: an acoustic-electric transducer for receiving spoken instructions from a user designating the operation mode and for outputting an electric speech signal in response thereto; speech recognition means receiving the electric speech signal output from the acoustic-electric transducer for recognizing words in the electric speech signal and outputting a signal corresponding to the recognized words; animation character generating means for producing a video signal of an animation character who is a message speaker that interacts with the user; video image display means for displaying the video signal from the animation character generating means; speech synthesizing means for synthesizing a speech signal of a message spoken by the animation character; speech outputting means for transmitting the speech signal from the speech synthesizing means in audible human sounds; and a microprocessor responsive to the output signal from the speech recognition means for producing an operation mode designation and control signal for designating the operation mode of the electronic equipment and controlling the electronic equipment to operate in the designated mode, an action control signal fed to the animation character generating means for controlling the action of the animation character, and a message signal fed to the speech synthesizing means instructing a message signal to be synthesized in the speech synthesizing means, wherein the microprocessor performs natural language or dialogue inference processing of the output signal from the speech recognition means.

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Claim 3:
3. A control apparatus for controlling electronic equipment as defined in claim 1, wherein the microprocessor detects if a new input has a content different from a content of a currently requested input in response to the new input.