US 5,915,001 · Granted 1999-06-22

The 1999 Patent That Imagined Voice Web Before Alexa

Imagine browsing the internet with your voice instead of your fingers—speaking commands to jump between linked audio documents formatted like web pages. This 1999 patent describes a voice-based web where you could navigate, authenticate yourself by voice, and train the system to recognize your unique speech patterns.

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The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a system for creating and accessing voice-based documents that behave like web pages, linked together using HTML-style connections and addressable via URLs. What's protected here is the specific method of embedding voice files with standardized formatting (MIME and HTML), allowing navigation through voice commands and touch-tone inputs, plus the ability to customize the system with speaker-recognition training files and personal preference settings tied to individual users.

Why it matters

Filed in 1996 and granted in 1999, this patent captures an early vision of voice-driven internet navigation—years before Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant existed. It stakes out the core idea of treating voice documents as navigable web content with user authentication and personalization. While the specific technologies (MIME extensions for voice, voice-based HTML anchors) didn't dominate the market, the patent represents an important conceptual foundation for how voice interfaces eventually merged with web standards and personalized user profiles.

Real-world use

When you ask Alexa to play a news briefing and then voice-command it to skip ahead, or use your voice to unlock your phone, you're interacting with distant descendants of this system's core concepts—voice-linked navigation and voice-based identity verification.

Original USPTO abstract

A system and method provides universal access to voice-based documents containing information formatted using MIME and HTML standards using customized extensions for voice information access and navigation. These voice documents are linked using HTML hyper-links that are accessible to subscribers using voice commands, touch-tone inputs and other selection means. These voice documents and components in them are addressable using HTML anchors embedding HTML universal resource locators (URLs) rendering them universally accessible over the Internet. This collection of connected documents forms a voice web. The voice web includes subscriber-specific documents including speech training files for speaker dependent speech recognition, voice print files for authenticating the identity of a user and personal preference and attribute files for customizing other aspects of the system in accordance with a specific subscriber.

Patent details

Publication number: US 5,915,001
Filing date: 1996-11-14
Grant date: 1999-06-22
Assignee: Vois Corporation
Inventor(s): UPPALURU; PREMKUMAR V.
CPC class: H04M3/4938

View original record on Google Patents →

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