CaptionCall LLC v. Ultratec Inc

1. Case Identification

• Case #: IPR No. Unassigned
• Patent #: 6,233,314
• Filed: August 30, 2013
• Petitioner(s): CaptionCall, L.L.C.
• Patent Owner(s): Ultratec, Inc.
• Challenged Claims: 1-2

2. Patent Overview

• Title: Relay for Personal Interpreter
• Brief Description: The ’314 patent discloses a telephone relay system for the hearing impaired. The system is designed to improve upon traditional methods, where an assistant manually types a hearing user's speech, by instead having the human call assistant "re-voice" the hearing user's speech into a voice recognition system that is trained specifically to the assistant's voice, which then converts the speech to text for the deaf user.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Anticipation of Claims 1-2 under 35 U.S.C. §102

• Prior Art Relied Upon: Ryan (Patent 5,809,112).
• Core Argument for this Ground:
  • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that Ryan discloses every element of the challenged claims, rendering them anticipated. Ryan was argued to explicitly teach that the "accuracy of the relay service may be improved" by having a relay agent "listen to the caller and repeat the voice message into a terminal" equipped with speech recognition software "specifically designed to recognize the voice of particular relay agents." For claim elements not expressly detailed, such as a speaker for the assistant to hear the caller or a microphone for the assistant to re-voice, Petitioner argued these components were inherently disclosed as they are necessary for the described system to function.

Ground 2: Obviousness of Claims 1-2 over Ryan in view of Wycherley

• Prior Art Relied Upon: Ryan (Patent 5,809,112), Wycherley (Patent 5,163,081).
• Core Argument for this Ground:
  • Prior Art Mapping: As an alternative position, Petitioner argued that if Ryan were found not to disclose certain hardware components of a call assistant's station (e.g., a headset with a speaker and microphone), Wycherley expressly discloses them. Wycherley teaches a relay service that includes attendant terminals equipped with standard hardware enabling an assistant to listen to a caller and speak. The combination of Ryan's re-voicing method and Wycherley's attendant terminal hardware was argued to meet all limitations of the challenged claims.
  • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would combine the references because both teach the use of trained voice recognition to improve relay services for the hearing impaired. A POSITA would have found it obvious to implement Ryan's re-voicing method using the well-known attendant terminal hardware disclosed in Wycherley to achieve the accuracy and efficiency benefits described in Ryan.

Ground 3: Obviousness of Claims 1-2 over Wycherley in view of Yamamoto

• Prior Art Relied Upon: Wycherley (Patent 5,163,081), Yamamoto (S. Yamamoto and M. Fujioka, New Applications of Speech Recognition, Proc. JASJ Conf. (Mar. 1996)).

• Core Argument for this Ground:

  • Prior Art Mapping: Wycherley discloses a relay system attempting full automation via speaker-dependent voice recognition trained on the unimpaired caller's voice, a method Petitioner argued is impractical for calls involving the general public. Yamamoto addresses the known problem of impractical fully automated systems by teaching an intermediate solution: using voice recognition on the voice of an "operator restating the question from the user." This is the core "re-voicing" concept.
  • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Wycherley with Yamamoto to solve a known problem with a known solution. When the full automation taught by Wycherley was impractical (e.g., for a caller without a pre-trained voice template), a POSITA would be motivated to incorporate Yamamoto's re-voicing technique at Wycherley's attendant terminal. This would allow the service to recapture the efficiency of voice recognition technology without the impracticalities of Wycherley's fully automated approach.
  • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a reasonable expectation of success because the combination merely applies a known solution (operator re-voicing) to a known problem (impracticality of fully automated speech recognition) within the established technological context of a telephone relay service.

• Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted an additional obviousness challenge against claims 1 and 2 over Wycherley in view of Ellozy (Patent 5,649,060), which similarly taught re-voicing (having a speaker "redictates the words spoken") as an alternative to fully automated transcription.

4. Key Technical Contentions (Beyond Claim Construction)

• The central technical premise of the petition, applied across all grounds, was that "re-voicing" was a well-known intermediate solution in the art before the ’314 patent's priority date. Petitioner argued that multiple prior art references, including Ryan, Yamamoto, and Ellozy, recognized that fully automated, speaker-independent voice recognition systems were often inaccurate or impractical. To overcome this deficiency, the art taught having a human operator (such as a relay agent or transcriptionist) listen to the original speaker and repeat the words into a speech recognizer trained to the operator's voice. This technique was presented as a known method for achieving high accuracy and efficiency, directly contradicting the patent's implicit assertion that applying this technique to a telephone relay service was a novel invention.

5. Relief Requested

• Petitioner requested that an inter partes review of the ’314 patent be instituted and that claims 1 and 2 be cancelled as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 318(b).