SOUND EVENT PROCESSING WITH ECHO ANALYSIS

摘要

Apparatus, methods, and machine-readable articles of manufacture enable a telephone system (100) to distinguish between actual events and echoes. Events may include conferees' voice and DTMF commands. In selected embodiments, the system categorizes (220) an event received (205) on one channel as a real event if the energy of the event's waveform is greater than (215) concurrent energy of every other channel of the same conference. Otherwise, the event is stored (235). When the system receives a new event of the same type on a channel of the same conference during a predetermined period, it compares (260) the energies of the new and stored events. If the energy of the new event exceeds (260) that of the stored event, the new event becomes the stored event (265), and the old stored event is ignored. At the end of the period, the stored event is categorized as a real event and forwarded (225) to appropriate application code.