Voice recognition of telephone conversations

(54) VOICE RECOGNITION OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS

(75) Inventors: Ronald John Bowater, Romsey;

Lawrence Leon Porter, Lyndhurst,
both of (GB)

(73) Assignee: International Business Machines
Corp., Armonk, NY (US)

( * ) Notice: Subject to any disclaimer, the term of this patent is extended or adjusted under 35 U.S.C. 154(b) by 0 days.

(21) Appl. No.: 09/107,686

(22) Filed: Jun. 30, 1998

(30) Foreign Application Priority Data

Jul. 9, 1997 (GB) 9714366

(51) Int. CI.7 H04M 1/64; H04M 11/00;

H04M 3/00

(52) U.S. CI 379/88.13; 379/265; 379/68;

379/88.01; 379/88.27; 379/267

(58) Field of Search 379/265, 88.16,

379/34, 35, 202, 88.13, 280, 258-267, 203, 201, 67.1, 68

(56) References Cited

U.S. PATENT DOCUMENTS

5,241,586 * 8/1993 Wilson et al 379/88.11

5,535,256 * 7/1996 Maloney et al 379/34

5,982,857 * 11/1999 Brady 379/88.19

6,026,148 * 2/2000 Dworkin et al 379/88.18

6,047,060 * 4/2000 Fedorov et al 379/265

6,067,516 * 5/2000 Levay et al 704/244

6,100,882 * 8/2000 Sharman et al 704/235

6,108,711 * 8/2000 Beck et al 709/242

* cited by examiner

Primary Examiner—Fan Tsang

Assistant Examiner—Ovidio Escalante

(74) Attorney, Agent, or Firm—-Jerry W. Herndon

(57) ABSTRACT

Voice data requires large storage resources even when compressed and takes a long time to retrieve. Further the required information cannot normally be directly located and it is difficult to analyze the voice data for statistical information. There is described a method for performing a voice recognition function on a voice telephone conversation to convert the conversation into text data using a voice processing system. The method comprises receiving voice data representing the telephone conversation comprising a first series of speech data from an agent interspersed with a second series of speech data from a client and storing the first and second series of speech data as a single body of voice data for later retrieval. Then a voice recognition function is performed on the voice data to convert it into text data representing the telephone conversation and the text data is stored for later retrieval. Such a solution allows entire days/weeks or even months of conversation to be stored and accessed. Since the memory space required is considerably smaller for text storage it is possible to keep many days of conversation in directly accessible memory that may be searched by a computer. Furthermore it is possible to search for keywords typed from the keyboard and it is not necessary to manually scan the entire conversation for the desired topic.

32 Claims, 3 Drawing Sheets