Appeal No. 1999-1581
Application No. 08/651,369
Turning to the obviousness rejection of claims 1 through
3, 5 through 7, 9 through 11 and 13 through 15, the examiner
indicates that Ranta teaches updating word probabilities with
each speech attempt in a speech recognition system (answer,
page 6). The examiner acknowledges (answer, page 6) that
Ranta does not teach “classification according to the highest-
ranking best word for all speech attempts by the user,” and
“computation of non-word probabilities.” According to the
examiner (answer, page 6), appellants’ disclosed and claimed
approach is “an arbitrary design choice,” and that it would
have been obvious to the skilled artisan to detect words “not
in the controlled vocabulary or of background acoustic noise.”
Inasmuch as Ranta was aware of “noise” in speech
recognition systems (column 1, lines 39 through 50; and column
2, lines 52 through 60), but chose not to use it in any way to
assist in the speech recognition process, we refuse to accept
the examiner’s notion that the appellants’ use of such noise
to generate non-word scores is a matter of “arbitrary design
choice.” Stated differently, the examiner’s contention
(answer, page 6) that Ranta’s speech recognition system and
7
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007