The patents identified there seem like they're on very loose footing. Firstly they're all from halfway the previous decade ... about 50 years after voice recogn

The patents identified there seem like they're on very loose footing. Firstly they're all from halfway the previous decade ... about 50 years after voice recognition was invented (and cute detail: even their client-server voice patent doesn't quite work because the first IBM speech recognizers ran on a cluster out of necessity, therefore they had "remote voice endpoints"). Everything else is hopelessly out of date. Today voice recognition happens with DNNs or LSTMs. None of those patents would apply to such methods. They seem to have attempted to patent obvious applications of voice recognition. http://www.google.com/patents/US6839669 http://www.google.com/patents/US6839669 Obviously identifies their old product (and I'm pretty sure I can find prior art for this one) where you could report your own voice and have it, say, open notepad when you say "open notepad". It's about making a computer respond to direct commands, and audio prompts. Seems to me like this would (should ?) never apply to a system that transcribes audio. Any modern interaction system would not be about responding to commands, except in an extremely broad sense. A page filled with a list of prior art: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=f3IV90zLmaEC&pg=PA209&lpg=PA209&dq=windows+3.1+voice+recognition&source=bl&ots=ujTq7m9KvR&sig=dP2xBHSKorQaQ-qzcTCg_WXApxI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiz0Jjvg8XLAhWl2KYKHfGGAqMQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=windows%203.1%20voice%20recognition&f=false https://books.google.com.au/books?id=f3IV90zLmaEC&pg=PA209&l... https://www.google.com/patents/US6785653 https://www.google.com/patents/US6785653 Is about interactions with users based on prompts. Essentially a scripted interaction with people Again this was filed in 2000. There has got to be prior art for this one. I remember using a system that did this before I entered high school, in 1994. And that was a pretty mature program, I bet when it comes to demos and papers you should be able to find systems doing this in the 70s. Obvious prior art, as the computer is obviously using prompts (e.g. the purchase confirmation) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7q1cE9_AaQ1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7q1cE9_AaQ1 (date: 1989) https://www.google.com/patents/US7058573 https://www.google.com/patents/US7058573 Is about methods to adjust past recognized words on semantic meaning. Seems to be talking about this sort of thing "I was about two" => "I was about to". A neural net recognizer doesn't do this at all. Also obviously prior art : this IBM engineer explains that this is exactly what he's doing. Judging by that computer this is early 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpdm1O-ob48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpdm1O-ob48 http://www.google.ch/patents/US7127393 http://www.google.ch/patents/US7127393 Is about limiting voice recognition results based on a set of rules. Why would anyone work things this way in 2016 ? It is far easier to just transcribe and respond conversationally to the transcription (or just train a network to respond directly, negating the need for actually having any rules at all. You'd just show the system what to do). Interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8XbmzOG5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8XbmzOG5s