Appeal No. 2002-1627
Application No. 09/132,450
Accordingly, since all of the limitations of independent claim
1 are not taught or suggested by the applied Yamakita reference,
the Examiner has not established a prima facie case of obviousness.
Therefore the 35 U.S.C. § 103 rejection of independent claim 1, as
well as claims 2-7 dependent thereon, based on Yamakita is not
sustained.
Turning to a consideration of the Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. § 103
rejection of claims 8 and 10-15 based on Yamakita, we note that
while we found Appellants’ arguments to be persuasive with respect
to the obviousness rejection of claims 1-7, we reach the opposite
conclusion with respect to claims 8 and 10-15. A review of the
language of independent method claim 8 reveals that, in contrast to
independent system claim 1 which specifically requires the voice
recognition system to be included in the mobile communication
terminal, the step of converting spoken word to text is not
required to be performed at the mobile terminal. In fact,
according to the express language of claim 8, the only steps
required to be performed by mobile terminals are the speaking of
words into a microphone at the transmitting end and the decoding of
a converted digital message at the receiving end. In our view,
while the voice recognition unit in Yamakita (117, Figure 11) is
not part of the mobile terminal 101, as discussed previously with
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