Appeal No. 2005-0743
Application No. 09/351,723
as part of the prior art beginning at specification page 2. From an artisan’s
perspective and from the public’s perspective, we do not see that
dependent claims 25 and 32 are either indefinite or otherwise deceptive in
the state of the art, nor do we see that the appellants are not particularly
pointing out and distinctly claiming in these claims what they regard as
their invention. Therefore, the rejection of claims 25 and 32 under the
second paragraph of 35 U.S.C. § 112, is reversed.
We also reverse the rejection of claims 23, 25, 30, 32 and 37 under
35 U.S.C. § 103 as being unpatentable over Schier in view of well-known
prior art for essentially two reasons. Initially, we note that the examiner
recognizes that Schier does not teach the feature recited in each of the
independent claims 23, 30 and 37 “responsive to the voice recognition
technique, selecting from the first plurality of users a second plurality of
users, smaller than the first plurality of users by a factor of at least 10.”
The examiner then utilizes Official Notice of well-known voice recognition
systems which reduce recognized persons from an initial list of persons at
least by a factor of ten. From this recognition, we conclude the examiner
has failed to establish a prima facie case of obviousness.
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