ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,315,501, issued on May 27, was assigned to ADEIA GUIDES INC. (San Jose, Calif.).

"Systems and methods for phonetic-based natural language understanding" was invented by Ajay Kumar Mishra (Karnataka, India) and Jeffry Copps Robert Jose (Tamil Nadu, India).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Systems and methods are described for modifying a phonetic search index based on a use frequency associated with phonetic representations of text terms included in metadata of a media item. A first phonetic representation of a text term of the metadata, pronounced as a word, may be generated. A second phonetic representation of the text term may be generated...