US Patent Issued to Google on Sept. 1 for "Hotwording by degree" (California, Massachusetts Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 1 -- United States Patent no. 12,725,609, issued on Sept. 1, was assigned to Google LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).

"Hotwording by degree" was invented by Brett Aladdin Barros (San Mateo, Calif.), James Flynn (Cambridge, Mass.) and Theo Goguely (Mountain View, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for a soft acceptance of a hotword receives audio data characterizing a soft hotword event detected by a hotword detector in streaming audio captured by a user device. The method also processes the audio data to determine that the audio data corresponds to a query specifying an action to perform on the user device. Without triggering performance of the action on the user...