Patent attributes
A voice-controlled question answering system that uses both a knowledge base and a detailed index of other sources that may be accessible over the Internet. The knowledge base is used to answer questions of more general interest whose answers are contained in the knowledge base. The index is used to answer more complex questions that are not answerable using the knowledge base. Web and other sources are analyzed to create the index, where text segments are indexed along with data describing the text segments in a quasi-semantic way. Quasi-semantic features are extracted from incoming spoken questions and used, along with machine learning trained models, to identify an indexed text segment that includes the answer to the question. The text segment may then be rearranged or simply passed to a speech synthesizer so the answer may be spoken aloud to a user.
