Appeal No. 2000-2291
Application No. 08/777,721
1293 (Fed. Cir. 2001) that for an invention to be obvious in view
of a combination of references, there must be some suggestion,
motivation, or teaching in the prior art that would have led a
person of ordinary skill in the art to select the references and
combine them in the way that would produce the claimed invention.
Based on these well-settled principles, we disagree with the
Examiner that, because voice mixers are used in generating
synthesized voice signals from complex time varying audio signals
or music waveforms, one of ordinary skill in the art would have
found it obvious to combine the voice synthesizer of Van Buskirk
with the facsimile apparatus of Hayashi. Although, broadly
speaking, Hayashi’s step a3 determines whether the facsimile
apparatus is receiving or not and could be interpreted as the
claimed step of determining an operational state of the facsimile
apparatus, Van Buskirk provides no teaching or suggestion for
incorporating in a telephone-facsimile apparatus the synthesized
voice function stored in a voice mixer. Van Buskirk, in fact,
merely discloses a method for processing in a voice mixer the
output signal from a voice synthesis function and it is the
claimed invention that provides the details of how to transmit an
aural message, stored in a voice mixer, corresponding to the
operational state of the facsimile apparatus. Furthermore, we
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