Troy

The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor who invented the technology behind the iPhone's Siri voice recognition capability received a large royalty payment two years ago when the school settled a legal dispute with Apple.

Cheng "Kent" Hsu, a professor of both industrial and systems engineering and information technology at RPI, received an $871,500 royalty payment from RPI in 2016, according to the school's tax filing that year.

Hsu declined comment when asked about the compensation Thursday.

The payment coincides with a $24.9 million settlement that RPI and a patent litigation firm reached with Apple in April of 2016 over voice recognition technology that Hsu had invented while at RPI and that RPI argued was critical to Siri's design.

Siri is the embedded voice recognition app in Apple's iPhone and iPad devices that helps answer questions that users pose by speaking into their device. The concept has since been copied by other device makers such as Amazon's Alexa voice recognition assistant.

RPI sued Apple back in 2012 in U.S. District Court in Albany claiming that Hsu and and his doctoral student, Veera Boonjing, invented a "natural language interface" system that could answer questions posed by human speech using sophisticated database searches.

Their invention actually had nothing to do with Siri and was made years before smartphones even emerged in the consumer electronics market.

RPI claimed that when it began using Siri in its iPhones and other devices, Apple had violated intellectual property laws and owed the school licensing fees. It was estimated at one point before the trial that the technology could be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars at trial.

Hsu and Boonjing filed a patent on the technology in 2001 as part of a larger pursuit to develop artificial intelligence. Their invention came years before the iPhone was launched in 2007 and a decade before Siri debuted on the iPhone 4S in 2011.

RPI had sold an exclusive license to the technology to a Texas patent litigation firm that buys up promising intellectual property and seeks out legal settlements or court awards from companies they believe are using the underlying technology without a license.

Before the RPI case against Apple was set to go to trial in 2016, Apple struck the $24.9 million settlement with Marathon Patent Group, the company that held the license to RPI's patent, and RPI.

Under the terms of the settlement, Marathon would get half, with RPI and Marathon's lawyers splitting the other half.

Under its standard agreement with its professor, RPI takes 65 percent of the royalty fees earned on any inventions or patents by its faculty. The inventors get 35 percent, although the amount they receive is after all legal and administrative costs are paid out in association with the patent, which can be costly.

It is unclear how much Boonjing earned in the case, if anything. Boonjing now teaches at King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Thailand.

RPI has never commented on the case or disclosed the exact amount it received in the settlement, although it is likely that the school may be bound by a non-disclosure clause.

Using information made public by Marathon Patent Group, the Times Union estimated at the time that RPI received about $8 million, although that was never officially confirmed.

A subsequent analysis by the Times Union guessed that Hsu would be entitled to about $950,000, which was not far off from the number that RPI disclosed in its tax filing.