US Patent Issued to Sonos on Sept. 29 for "Arbitration-based voice recognition" (Massachusetts Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 30 -- United States Patent no. 12,749,486, issued on Sept. 29, was assigned to Sonos Inc. (Goleta, Calif.).

"Arbitration-based voice recognition" was invented by Steven Beckhardt (Boston) and Ted Lin (Ayer, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A first network microphone device (NMD) is configured to receive, from a second NMD, a first arbitration message including (i) a first measure of confidence associated with a voice input detected by the second NMD and (ii) the voice input detected by the second NMD, and receive, from a third NMD, a second arbitration message including (i) a second measure of confidence associated with the voice input as detected by the third NMD a...