ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,334,081, issued on June 17, was assigned to Amazon Technologies Inc. (Seattle).
"Voice controlled assistant with coaxial speaker and microphone arrangement" was invented by Timothy Theodore List (Santa Cruz, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A voice controlled assistant has a housing to hold one or more microphones, one or more speakers, and various computing components. The housing has an elongated cylindrical body extending along a center axis between a base end and a top end. The microphone(s) are mounted in the top end and the speaker(s) are mounted proximal to the base end. The microphone(s) and speaker(s) are coaxially aligned ...