US 5,918,180 · Granted 1999-06-29
The 1999 Patent That Turned Your Car Into a Talking GPS Tracker
Imagine calling your car like it's a friend, and it tells you exactly where it is using GPS satellites and a robot voice. This patent combines a GPS receiver, a cell phone, and a speech synthesizer so you can ring up your vehicle and hear its latitude and longitude read back to you out loud.
The plain-English version
What it protects
The claim covers a system that pairs a GPS receiver with a cellular telephone and adds a speech synthesizer circuit in between them. What's protected here is the specific way those three components talk to each other—the GPS feeds location data to the synthesizer, which converts those coordinates into spoken words that come through the phone's speaker. Anyone making a device that lets you call a vehicle and hear its location via voice synthesis using this exact architecture would be infringing.
Why it matters
This patent arrived in 1999, years before widespread smartphone GPS and well before real-time vehicle tracking became routine. It staked out an early claim on the idea of making a vehicle remotely locatable by telephone—a concept that later became central to anti-theft systems, fleet management, and emergency response. Though the specific speech-synthesis approach has been superseded by map apps and data services, the foundational concept of remote vehicle location via wireless communication traces back to innovations like this one.
Real-world use
If you've ever used a car's roadside assistance to locate a stolen vehicle or a fleet manager tracked a delivery truck by phone, you're benefiting from the same core idea: calling in to learn where a vehicle is positioned in the world.
Original USPTO abstract
A tracking system for monitoring and locating vehicles includes a cellular telephone that is located in the vehicle, a global positioning system (GPS) receiver also located with the vehicle, and an interface unit between the global positioning receiver and the telephone. The global positioning receiver communicates with a system of satellites and provides continuous data, reflecting the present. spacial position of the vehicle in terms of its latitude/longitude coordinates. The interface between the GPS receiver and the wireless telephone includes a speech synthesizer circuit which converts the digitally encoded spacial coordinates into speech, which enunciates the position through the cellular telephone. By calling the vehicle cellular telephone from a remote location, the owner of the vehicle can hear the location of the vehicle, and then use that information to obtain its precise location.
Patent details
- Publication number
- US 5,918,180
- Filing date
- 1995-12-22
- Grant date
- 1999-06-29
- Assignee
- Dimino; Michael
- Inventor(s)
- DIMINO; MICHAEL
- CPC class
- B60R25/102
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