Patent 7698136 was granted and assigned to Voxify on April, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The present invention is directed to a computer implemented method and apparatus for flexibly recognizing meaningful data items within an arbitrary user utterance. According to one example embodiment of the invention, a set of one or more key phrases and a set of one or more filler phrases are defined, probabilities are assigned to the key phrases and/or the filler phrases, and the user utterances is evaluated against the set of key phrases and the set of filler phrases using the probabilities.