Appeal No. 2003-0774
Application 09/841,764
Appellants respond that because Rapeli is silent on the
dependency or independency between processing speech and non-
speech segments, such silence should be construed in light of
conventional wisdom in the art, which teaches a dependency [reply
brief].
With respect to the teachings of Rapeli, we agree with
appellants that Rapeli cannot be relied on for teaching that the
silence description coding mode is independent of the previous
speech signal coding mode. As argued by appellants, the failure
of Rapeli to disclose that the silence description coding mode is
dependent on the speech coding mode is not evidence that there
must be an independence between them. We agree with appellants
that a teaching of independence cannot be inferred from the
failure of Rapeli to disclose any relationship at all.
Therefore, we conclude that the finding made by the examiner with
respect to Rapeli, which is quoted above in the discussion of the
rejection, is unsupported by the reference.
With respect to the teachings of Delargy, however, we do
not agree with appellants that the operation of Delargy does not
teach the claimed independence. Delargy improves upon a speech
signal coding standard by coding a frame of silence with a single
output byte. If the next frame is also silence, no output is
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