US Patent 6882973 Speech recognition system with barge-in capability

A voice processing system includes a speech recognition facility with barge-in. The system plays out a prompt to a caller, who starts to provide their spoken response while the prompt is still being played out. The system performs speech recognition on this response to determine a corresponding text, which is then subjected to lexical analysis. This tests whether the text satisfies one or more conditions, for example, including one or more words from a predefined set of task words. If this is found to be the case, the playing out of the prompt is terminated (i.e. barge-in is effected); otherwise, the playing out of the prompt is continued, essentially as if the caller bad not interrupted.