ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,314,631, issued on May 27, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).

"Method and system for adjusting sound playback to account for speech detection" was invented by Christopher T. Eubank (Mountain View, Calif.), Devin W. Chalmers (Oakland, Calif.), Kirill Kalinichev (San Francisco), Rahul Nair (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Thomas G. Salter (Foster City, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method performed by an audio system comprising a headset. The method sends a playback signal containing user-desired audio content to drive a speaker of the headset that is being worn by a user, receives a microphone signal from a microphone that...