Appeal No. 1998-0610
Application 08/584,726
factual basis for its rejection. It may not, because it may doubt
that the invention is patentable, resort to speculation,
unfounded assumptions or hindsight reconstruction to supply
deficiencies in its factual basis. (Emphasis in original).
The examiner correctly states (answer at 15): “The crux of Applicant’s arguments
appear to rest on the issue of whether the prior art of record teaches or suggests
broadcasting from a transmitter of digitally coded speech allophone information and
special inflection codes for inflection.” The examiner concludes (answer at 15) “[t]he prior
art of record clearly establishes that it would have been obvious to one skilled at the time
the invention was made to broadcast from a transmitter of digitally coded speech
allophone information and special inflection codes for inflection.” That conclusion,
however, is unsupported by sufficient factual basis.
The examiner stated (answer at 6) that although Yamaguchi does not explicitly
teach that the broadcast text data includes “digitally coded speech allophone information,”
Parsons teaches text-to-speech synthesis comprising a two-step procedure of text-to-
phoneme conversion and phoneme-to-speech conversion, wherein the phoneme is
“speech allophone information.” The examiner further stated that it would have been
obvious to one with ordinary skill to “substitute the phonemes used in text-to-speech
conversion as taught by Parsons” for the general teaching of transmitted text as taught by
Yamaguchi.
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