Apple sued for Siri tech by Taiwan University

It appears that Apple is not safe from the continual downpour of patent cases as this week the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan is readied and filed an infringement case against Apple's use of Siri on the iPhone and iPad. The patents in question here have to do with speech recognition which the plaintiffs suggest was filed by them in 2005 as a "Method and system for matching speech data." This patent is available under patent number 7,707,032 in the United States.

This patent appears to cover a method and system used to connect actual speech with recognized patterns and samples, to put it simply. The assignee here is the National Cheng Kung University and the patent was granted in 2010 on the 27th of April. The filing took place back in the fourth quarter of 2005, and the University now notes that the patent specifically refers to devices such as smartphones or tablets which use said technology.

This group also has a patent granted in 2007 which covers simply a "Speech recognition system" that works to divide speech processing into 4 modules. These modules you may recognize: system control, autocorrelation and linear predictive coefficient, cepstrum, and DTW recognition. Each of these modules have also formed an IP component on their own, and the University is coming full force at Apple for what they feel they're owed because of them.

The second patent in question here has the University noting that, "The '496 Patent is generally directed to a complete speech recognition system having a training button and a recognition button." It's likely that Apple will contend that their technology was developed outside of the devices they're now tied to, but we're sure there'll be a bit of contention on whether or not the iPhone and iPad actually fit within the bounds of the patents since they're not made primarily for speech recognition.

We shall see! Check out the timeline below for more patent wars in the Apple universe and prepare yourself for more hot action as the Samsung case ramps up here in the USA!

[via Patently Apple]