Playback Audio Alerts With Priority Queueing and Multiroom Delivery
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Solution Overview
Problem
Smart devices often fail to effectively notify users of alerts, especially when the user's mobile device is powered off, silenced, or distracted, and notifications may not reach multiple people in different rooms effectively.
Innovation Solution
A playback device is configured with an API to receive alert communications from smart devices, prioritize notifications, and output audio alerts, potentially interrupting or ducking existing audio content to ensure alerts are heard across multiple rooms.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If notifications are sent to mobile devices, then users can receive alerts, but notifications fail when mobile device is powered off, silenced, or distracted
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a media playback system as an intermediary notification device that receives and plays alert notifications from smart devices. This mediator bypasses the mobile device dependency by using the playback system's audio output capabilities to deliver notifications through the home environment, ensuring delivery even when the mobile device is unavailable or silenced.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transitions notifications from a single-device dimension (mobile device only) to a multi-dimensional approach by leveraging the spatial distribution of playback devices across multiple rooms. This allows notifications to be delivered through different physical locations and audio channels, expanding coverage beyond the mobile device's limitations.
2Reliability
If playback device broadcasts alerts across multiple rooms, then alert reception improves, but existing audio content may be interrupted or drowned out
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements dynamic audio mixing that adjusts playback levels in real-time based on notification priority. The system dynamically ducks (lowers) the volume of existing audio content when notifications are delivered, then restores it afterward. This dynamic adjustment ensures notification delivery while minimizing permanent disruption to the audio experience.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent uses periodic audio interruption patterns where the notification audio is inserted at specific intervals or at natural pauses in the existing content. The system periodically assesses whether to interrupt or duck audio based on the notification's urgency and the current playback state, creating a rhythmic pattern of interruption and restoration that maintains both notification delivery and audio content continuity.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods for a playback device outputting an audio alert from a network-enabled device include (i) while the playback device is playing back audio content, receiving an alert communication from the network-enabled device, the alert communication including (a) an audio notification identifier that identifies an audio notification and (b) a priority identifier that identifies a priority level of the audio notification; (ii) responsive to receiving the alert communication, adding the audio notification to a notification queue at a particular queue position, where the particular queue position of the audio notification in the notification queue is based on the priority level of the audio notification relative to other audio content in the notification queue; (iii) adjusting playback of the audio content for playing back the audio notification; and (iv) the playback device playing back the audio notification.