US Patent 9875081 Device selection for providing a response

A system may use multiple speech interface devices to interact with a user by speech. All or a portion of the speech interface devices may detect a user utterance and may initiate speech processing to determine a meaning or intent of the utterance. Within the speech processing, arbitration is employed to select one of the multiple speech interface devices to respond to the user utterance. Arbitration may be based in part on metadata that directly or indirectly indicates the proximity of the user to the devices, and the device that is deemed to be nearest the user may be selected to respond to the user utterance.