Appeal No. 2002-1627
Application No. 09/132,450
“sequence of letters and gaps.” For all of the reasons discussed
supra with regard to Ichikawa, we remain of the opinion that the
skilled artisan would have recognized that the conversion of spoken
words into text would necessarily create gaps between words to
provide intelligible communication.
We are in agreement, however, with Appellant’s further
argument that, unlike independent claim 1 which requires that
speech processing involving conversion of spoken words into text
takes place at the mobile communication device, Yamakita’s speech
processing occurs at the receiving end of the communication network
and not at the mobile terminal. In this regard, our interpretation
of the disclosure of Yamakita coincides with that of Appellant,
i.e., no conversion of speech into text takes place at the mobile
terminal 101 illustrated in Figures 1-3. We further note that the
Examiner has identified (Answer, page 4) the unit illustrated in
Figure 11 of Yamakita as corresponding to the claimed voice
recognition unit. It is clear from Yamakita (column 31, lines 38-
47), however, that Figure 11 is a functional block diagram of
speech recognition section 117 which, as illustrated in Yamakita’s
Figure 1, is not part of the mobile terminal 110 but rather a part
of speech control host unit 108.
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