Apple Granted Patents for Speech Synthesis, MacBook, a New iPhone Dock, more

On August 5, 2008, the US Patent & Trademark Office published six of Apple’s newly granted patents which covered such subject matters as speech synthesis, MacBook and iPod lanyard designs, a new iPhone stand/dock, backlighting for notebooks and lastly, compensation circuitry. I don’t own an iPhone, yet, but it appears that the iPhone stand/dock is a yet unreleased design.

Patent:  Stand

Apple’s first granted patent of the day generally relates to an iPhone stand/dock design that appears to be a new one. The design isn’t currently displayed at the Apple Store. Apple’s patent was originally filed for in September 2007. Apple lists Christopher David Prest (San Francisco, CA) and Eugene Antony Whang (San Francisco, CA) as the inventors of this patent.

Patent:  Computing Device

Apple’s second granted patent of the day generally relates to their MacBook design.

Apple lists the following engineers associated with this granted MacBook patent which was originally filed in October 2007: Andre; Bartley K. (Menlo Park, CA), Coster; Daniel J. (San Francisco, CA), Iuliis; Daniele De (San Francisco, CA), Howarth; Richard P. (San Francisco, CA), Ive; Jonathan P. (San Francisco, CA), Jobs; Steve (Palo Alto, CA), Kerr; Duncan Robert (San Francisco, CA), Nishibori; Shin (San Francisco, CA), Rohrbach; Matthew Dean (San Francisco, CA), Satzger; Douglas B. (Menlo Park, CA), Seid; Calvin Q. (Palo Alto, CA), Stringer; Christopher J. (Portola Valley, CA), Whang; Eugene Antony (San Francisco, CA), Zorkendorfer; Rico (San Francisco, CA). T

Patent: Electronic Device Holder

Apple’s third granted patent of the day generally relates to an iPod holder used in a lanyard as shown here.

Apple lists the following engineers associated with this granted patent which was originally filed in March 2007: Andre; Bartley K. (Menlo Park, CA), Coster; Daniel J. (San Francisco, CA), De Iuliis; Daniele (San Francisco, CA), Howarth; Richard P. (San Francisco, CA), Ive; Jonathan P. (San Francisco, CA), Kerr; Duncan Robert (San Francisco, CA), Nishibori; Shin (San Francisco, CA), Rohrbach; Matthew Dean (San Francisco, CA), Satzger; Douglas B. (Menlo Park, CA), Seid, legal representative; Vincent Keane (Los Gatos, CA), Stringer; Christopher J. (Woodside, CA), Whang; Eugene Antony (San Francisco, CA), Zorkendorfer; Rico (San Francisco, CA), Seid; Calvin Q. (Palo Alto, CA).

Patent:  Method and Apparatus for Backlighting a Device

Apple’s forth granted patent of the day generally relates to light guide panels and more particularly to an improved light guide panel utilized with display devices in relation to a keyboard.

Apple’s patent FIG. 3 illustrates a second embodiment of a light guide panel 200 in accordance with the present invention. Four LEDs 202a-202d are located on specific points of a light guide panel 202 with opaque portions 203 thereover. By strategically placing the LEDs in the appropriate place there is a more even distribution of light. The LEDs could be placed, for example, under a logo, a number keypad or other appropriate portion of the keyboard. In so doing, there may be a bright spot, but it will not distract the user. It should be understood that although four LEDs are shown in this figure, one of ordinary skill in the art recognizes that any number of LEDs could be utilized and their use would be within the spirit and scope of the present invention. FIG. 2 illustrates a first embodiment of a light guide panel in accordance with the present invention.

Apple lists Steven Porter Hotelling (San Jose, CA) as the sole inventor of this granted patent which was originally filed in June 2005.

Patent:  Data-Driven Global Boundary Optimization

Apple’s fifth granted patent of the day generally relates to text-to-speech synthesis, and in particular relates to concatenative speech synthesis.

Apple’s patent FIG. 1 illustrates a system level overview of an embodiment of a text-to-speech (TTS) system 100 which produces a speech waveform 158 from text 152. TTS system 100 includes three components: a segmentation component 101, a voice table component 102 and a run-time component 150. Segmentation component 101 divides recorded speech input 106 into segments for storage in a voice table 110. Voice table component 102 handles the formation of a voice table 116 with discontinuity information. Run-time component 150 handles the unit selection process during text-to-speech synthesis. Recorded speech from a professional speaker is input at block 106. In one embodiment, the speech may be a user’s own recorded voice, which may be merged with an existing database (after suitable processing) to achieve a desired level of coverage. The recorded speech is segmented into units at segmentation block 108. Contiguity information is preserved in the voice table 110 so that longer speech segments may be recovered. For example, where a speech segment S.sub.1-R.sub.1 is divided into two segments. S.sub.1 and R.sub.1, information is preserved indicating that the segments are contiguous; i.e. there is no artificial concatenation between the segments.

Apple lists Jerome R. Bellegarda (Los Gatos, CA) as the sole inventor of this granted patent which was originally filed in October 2003.

Patent:  Circuits and Methods for Amplifying Signals

Apple’s sixth granted patent of the day generally relates to compensation circuitry in electronic circuits and devices and more particularly to a power supply compensation circuit in class D modulators.

Apple’s patent FIG. 10 shows a schematic of a compensation circuit for a class D amplifier according to the present invention.

Apple lists Douglas M. Farrar (Los Altos, CA) and Wendell B. Sander (Los Gatos, CA) as the inventors of this granted patent which was originally filed for in June 2006.

NOTICE:  MacNN presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or grant is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent applications and/or grants should be read in its entirety for further details.

Written and researched by Neo

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