The Indian Patent Office rejects Google’s invention of ‘text messages using voice command’. Initially this application was filed in 2006 by Motorola Mobility LLC, now assigned to Google Technology Holdings LLC for method and apparatus of providing text messages. The patent office describes the method particularly useful for providing text messages using voice inputs processed on a portable electronic device with limited memory and computational capacity.

In one aspect of the invention, there is a method of providing a text message. This includes the steps of receiving voice at an input of an electronic device and after that speech recognition is performed on the words issued. Speech recognition is defined by matching the words issued with one of the templates to create a matching template. A text message is then provided from the matching template. More processing power and memory are needed to develop a system like this.

The Indian Patent Office said that the open vocabulary speech recognition systems and methods require relatively high computational overheads and are not acceptable for portable electronic devices such as personal digital assistants, radiotelephones and other portable devices.

And also the company responded to the objections in the first examination report on June 8, 2017. The claims are rejected as it does not have inventive hardware features and only have conventional hardware features and also the invention lies only in the method.

Indian Patent Office stated  that the invention is not patentable under the Section 2(1)(j) of The Patents Act, 1970, which states that an invention requires an inventive step and capable of industrial application, and Section 3(K), which states that a mathematical or business method or a computer programs or algorithms are not patentable.

The Author is a Patent Consultant from MR Technollect Solutions (www.MRTechnollect.com).