[Tyler]

Apple to pay $24.9 million to settle Siri patent lawsuit
20 April 2016, 12:00 am

                    Apple has agreed to pay $24.9 million to a patent holding company to resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit accusing Siri of infringing one of its patents. Apple will pay the money to Marathon Patent Group, the parent company of Texas firm Dynamic Advances, which held an exclusive license to a 2007 patent covering natural language user interfaces for enterprise databases.

PCWorldLink

Source: AI in the News

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[Don Patrick]

I don't know the details of the patent, but it sounds pretty wrong to have one on language processing in general. It seems to suggest that everything with voice recognition technology is in violation of the patent.

[Art]

Details? You want details? OK, but I warn you, I found one four line paragraph that was one sentence. Yes, the legalese used was a very run-on sentence that used many commas in its description of basically a pattern matching program much like we use and have used since Eliza.

At the bottom of the page (long scroll down), you'll notice a textual display of an algorithm for text processing of the graphs, semantics, elements, etc. of the database used along with methods to resolve ambiguity (which I'd like to see), and much more.

Either way, enjoy reading through US Patent 7177798
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7177798.PN.&OS=PN/7177798&RS=PN/7177798

[Don Patrick]

I'm fluent in legalese. It says "blah blah keyword database blah blah ambiguity resolution with probabilities and some other stuff". Yeah, that sounds like it could describe Siri and is just vague enough to describe just about all voice recognition software. They don't seem to detail the method of disambiguation well, but it sounds like old hat N-gram probabilities. I guess back in 2007 everything was patentable.