US 12586563 B2 / Mar 24, 2026

Method, system and apparatus for understanding and generating human conversational cues

A voice-based digital assistant (VDA) uses a conversation intelligence (CI) manager module having a rule-based engine on conversational intelligence to process information from one or more modules to make determinations on both i) understanding the human conversational cues and ii) generating the human conversational cues, including at least understanding and generating a backchannel utterance, in a flow and exchange of human communication in order to at least one of grab or yield a conversational floor between a user and the VDA. The CI manager module uses the rule-based engine to analyze and make a determination on a conversational cue of, at least, prosody in a user's flow of speech to generate the backchannel utterance to signal any of i) an understanding, ii) a correction, iii) a confirmation, and iv) a questioning of verbal communications conveyed by the user in the flow of speech during a time frame when the user still holds the conversational floor.