ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,437,761, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to Google LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).
"Group hotwords" was invented by Matthew Sharifi (Kilchberg, Switzerland) and Victor Carbune (Zurich, Switzerland).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method includes a first assistant-enabled device (AED) receiving an assignment instruction assigning a group hotword to a selected group of AEDs that includes the first AED and one or more other AEDs. Each AED is configured to wake-up from a low-power state when the group hotword is detected in streaming audio by at least one of the AEDs. The method also includes receiving audio data that corresponds to an utterance ...