Veveo Awarded Patent for Conversational Capability within Speech-Based Interfaces

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent to Veveo, a provider of semantic technologies for intelligent search, discovery, and personalization solutions. The patent covers speech-based interfaces with natural language understanding.

The patent, entitled "Method of and System for Using Conversation State Information in a Conversational Interaction System," (USPTO Number 8,577,671), covers a speech-based system's capability to recognize whether a subsequent query is related to the previous one that a user input into a system, thereby allowing the user to build on a previous query without repetition. This capability also allows devices to know when a context has changed or is ambiguous, thereby giving users appropriate responses that appear natural and humanlike.

With this technology, users can conduct ongoing dialogues for discovery and navigation, going beyond simple voice commands and isolated queries. The system maintains awareness of the user’s intent, thereby allowing him to drill down into a query and change queries during navigation.

This patent gives Veveo 47 issued patents.  Veveo has filed more than 80 patent applications to date for advanced technologies that support more than 100 million connected devices and televisions globally through Tier-1 service providers, device OEMs, and pay-TV operators.

"We are very excited about bringing our technological advances to market in order to help dramatically enhance the usability of speech-based applications so that systems adapt to users and not the other way around," said Murali Aravamudan, founder and CEO of Veveo, in a statement. "Our conversational interfaces are already in trials with pay-TV service providers, but the implications of this technology will make speech-based interfaces natural and humanlike for most areas of users' connected lives."