With the advent of mobile telephones and mobile computing devices, speech interface products have been developed for allowing users to communicate with and command their mobile computing devices, for example, cell phones, personal digital assistants, and the like via audible or voice commands. In current implementations of speech command function systems, all speech commands are global. That is, any command, such as “call John Smith at home,” may be used at any time when a user interacts with the speech user interface. Such global commands may only be used because a developer of the speech command user interface provides all possible speech “grammars” or phrases available for recognition by the system. Great care must be taken in the design of such speech user interfaces to ensure that speech commands do not conflict with one another at any point.
However, when a given mobile computing device, for example, a mobile telephone, is equipped with multiple software applications, each of which enabled for receiving speech commands, individual speech “grammars” or phrases may conflict with each other. That is, if two software applications, each of which are enabled for speech commands, are existing on a single mobile computing device, or are accessible from a single mobile computing device, each software application may include identical speech grammars that have a different meaning for each respective software application. For example, each of two software applications loaded on a mobile telephone may recognize the word “open,” but each of the respective software applications may interpret the word differently and use the word to launch or activate a different functionality associated with the respective software application. Thus, a conflict may occur when a user speaks a command into a mobile computing device where certain “grammars” or phrases available for recognition are recognized by more than one available software application.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.