Appeal No. 2003-0774
Application 09/841,764
the rejection with respect to independent claim 34 as the
representative claim of the group. In the final rejection, the
examiner fails to explain what the citation of Delargy has to do
with the rejection of independent claims 21 or 34. Delargy is
only mentioned in connection with claim 38 which is not one of
the claims listed in the rejection. In the answer, the examiner
repeats the rejection from the final rejection. This rejection
essentially finds that Rapeli teaches the claimed invention.
Specifically, the examiner finds that “[b]y not specifying a
dependency between processing speech and non-speech segments,
Rapeli makes it clear to a person of ordinary skill in the art of
speech signal processing that the selection of the silent mode
would be made independent of any previous speech coding mode”
[answer, pages 5-6]. In the answer, however, the examiner also
adds the finding that it would have been obvious to the artisan
to apply the teachings of Delargy in the invention of Rapeli
because Delargy teaches the coding of each audio segment without
regard for prior operations to avoid storing intermediate steps
of prior processes [id., page 6].
Appellants argue that Rapeli fails to teach a silence
description coding mode which is independent of the speech coding
mode. Appellants note that Rapeli fails to discuss dependency or
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