Appeal No. 1998-2577
Application No. 08/594,054
made to combine the teachings of Hejna, Jr. et al
into the system of Asada et al because Hejna, Jr. et
al teaches time scale modification system
(stretching and compressing the speech time base is
considered as TSM) can be used by a voice mail
system in order to provide a message to a listener
as a faster or slower rate than that at which the
message was recorded as taught by Hejna, Jr. et al
(col. 1, lines 40-43). [Answer-pages 3 and 4.]
Appellants do not contest the use of Hejna in the
rejection, and accept Hejna for its teaching of use in a voice
mail system. Appellants also indicate that the Examiner’s
reliance on Hejna for history-based encoding is moot since
they concede Asada teaches such a technique (brief-page 10).
Appellants also acknowledge that Asada relates to
altering the playback speed of a voice signal without changing
the pitch (brief-page 5), and “operates on audio data encoded
as 20 ms LPC frames (blocks), exactly the same form of input
data as the present invention.” (brief-page 8).
However, Appellants argue that Asada discloses two
systems, neither of which teaches Appellants’ claimed
invention. The first system of Asada is disclosed as a prior
art system. The prior art system repeats or deletes unencoded
waveforms to vary the playback speed. This is contrary to
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