DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Response to Amendment
Claims 1 and 11 are amended. Claims 1, 4-11, and 14-20 are presented for examination.
Response to Arguments
Rejection under 35 U.S.C. 101
Applicant’s arguments have been fully considered and are persuasive. The amended independent claims recite receiving a voice input from a user, identifying a particular voice assistant the user intends to interact with that is a separate device, generating a voice message that converts the voice input into a format more understandable to a voice assistant, and providing the converted message to an application of an identified voice assistant designed to communicate with a social network platform. Thus, the claims recite “significantly more” because they provide an improvement for human-machine interfaces by allowing users who are uncomfortable with using personal voice assistants to communicate with an intelligent voice interface to identify and interact with a personal voice assistant on behalf of the user to accomplish the user’s tasks.
Rejection under 35 U.S.C. 103
Applicant's arguments with respect to “identifying a particular type of personal voice assistant that the user intends to interact with” as recited in the amended independent claims has been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
Applicant argues “as agreed upon during the interview, none of Teserra, Salter, and Andreas alone or in combination discloses ‘identifying a particular type of personal voice assistant that the user intends to interact with which is a separate device from the computing device owned by a separate entity from the computing device.’” However, upon further search and consideration, Salter teaches “identifying a particular type of personal voice assistant” in paragraph [0064], which states “a connection management system 520 that receives the communication and identifies which terminal device is to respond to the communication.” Further, Salter specifies that this “terminal device” can be a personal voice assistant in paragraph [0169], which states “Client devices, network devices, and other devices can be computing systems… Examples of computing devices include desktop computers, laptop computers, server computers, hand-held computers, tablets, smart phones, personal digital assistants, digital home assistants, as well as machines and apparatuses in which a computing device has been incorporated.” Different “terminal devices” can represent different personal voice assistants. Therefore, Salter teaches identifying a particular type of personal voice assistant (terminal device) that a user intends to interact with.
Applicant’s arguments with respect to “provide, via an application of the identified personal voice assistant specifically designed for communication with the social network platform” as recited in the amended independent claims have been considered but are moot because the new ground of rejection does not rely on any reference applied in the prior rejection of record for any teaching or matter specifically challenged in the argument.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1, 4, 8-11, 14, and 18-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Teserra et al. (US 20200342873 A1; hereinafter referred to as Teserra) in view of Salter et al. (US 20220329561 A1; hereinafter referred to as Salter), Andreas et al. (US20180061408 A1; hereinafter referred to as Andreas), and Bedell et al. (US 20200334740 A1; hereinafter referred to as Bedell).
Regarding claim 1, Teserra discloses: a computer-implemented method for facilitating user interactions with a social network platform ([0045] A digital assistant, such as digital assistant 106 depicted in FIG. 1, can be made available or accessible to its users 108 through a variety of different channels, such as but not limited to, via certain applications, via social media platforms), the computer-implemented method comprising: receiving, by one or more processors of an intelligent voice interface in a computing device, user input data indicative of a voice input of a user that conveys information in a first format ([0013] a chatbot system receives an utterance. A language of the utterance is determined. A set of rules is then identified for the language of the utterance);
determining, by the one or more processors processing the user input data using one or more natural language processing models... ([0040] Digital assistant 106 is configured to apply natural language understanding (NLU) techniques to the utterance to understand the meaning of the user input);
generating, by the one or more processors based upon the one or more intents of the user ([0091] the utterance received by the EIS 230 is deemed a non-explicitly invoking utterance 234 and is input to an intent classifier (e.g., intent classifier 242) of the master bot to determine which bot to use for handling the utterance), one or more voice messages that conveys the information in a second format different from the first format which is more likely to be understood by the identified personal voice assistant… ([0094] EIS 230 is responsible for determining whether any portion of the utterance should be used as input to the skill bot being explicitly invoked. In particular, EIS 230 can determine whether part of the utterance is not associated with the invocation. The EIS 230 can perform this determination through analysis of the utterance and/or analysis of the extracted information 205. EIS 230 can send the part of the utterance not associated with the invocation to the invoked skill bot in lieu of sending the entire utterance that was received by the EIS 230... In some instances, EIS 230 may re format the part to be sent to the invoked bot, e.g., to form a complete sentence);
and providing, by the one or more processors of the intelligent voice interface… ([0090] the newly formed utterance corresponding to this particular intent (e.g., one of utterance 206 or utterance 208) will be the first to be sent for further processing by EIS 230), the one or more voice messages that conveys the information in the second format ([0094] In some instances, EIS 230 may reformat the part to be sent to the invoked bot, e.g., to form a complete sentence) to the identified personal voice assistant configured to communicate with the social network platform ([0271] communications subsystem 1124 may be configured to receive (or send) data feeds 1126 in real-time from users of social media networks and/or other communication services such as Twitter® feeds, Facebook® updates, web feeds such as Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds, and/or real-time updates from one or more third party information sources).
Teserra does not explicitly, but Salter teaches: one or more intents of the user ([0093] determining a user's intent and routing the user to a destination system based on the intent) including identifying a particular type of personal voice assistant ([0169] Client devices, network devices, and other devices can be computing systems that include one or more integrated circuits, input devices, output devices, data storage devices, and/or network interfaces, among other things… Examples of computing devices include desktop computers, laptop computers, server computers, hand-held computers, tablets, smart phones, personal digital assistants, digital home assistants, as well as machines and apparatuses in which a computing device has been incorporated) that the user intends to interact with ([0064] a connection management system 520 that receives the communication and identifies which terminal device is to respond to the communication. Such determination can depend on identifying a client to which that communication pertains (e.g., based on a content analysis or user input indicative of the client) and determining one or more metrics for each of one or more terminal devices associated with the client) which is a separate device from the computing device owned by a separate entity from the computing device ([0092] A message transmitter interface 660 can then transmit the communication to the terminal device. The transmission may include, for example, a wired or wireless transmission to a device housed in a separate housing. The terminal device can include a terminal device in a same or different network (e.g., local-area network) as connection management system 600);
Teserra and Salter are considered analogous in the field of audio/text processing. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the teachings of Teserra to combine the teachings of Salter because doing so would allow for more flexibility in user input and a better selection of a personal voice assistant for a user to communicate with based on the content of the user's message and the user's intent (Salter [0115] Intelligent routing system 925 may evaluate the incoming message according to certain embodiments described above. For example, intelligent routing system 925 may evaluate the content (e.g., text, audio clips, images, emoticons, or other suitable content) included in the received message using a trained machine-learning model. The content of the message can be inputted into the machine-learning model to generate a predicted destination (e.g., a particular terminal device or bot)).
The combination of Teserra and Salter does not explicitly, but Andreas teaches: wherein the second format includes different terminology from the first format ([0036] paraphrases may also be created from any system input utterance by replacing words or phrases with synonyms, either individually or in multiplicity. (These replacements may also include replacing idioms with appropriate non-idiomatic expressions, like for example replacing “kick the bucket” with “die”.));
Teserra, Salter, and Andreas are considered analogous in the field of audio/text processing. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the teachings of Teserra and Salter to combine the teachings of Andreas because doing so would allow for user utterances to be modified in different ways to receive a more desirable response from a voice assistant, which improves flexibility in types of user input utterances (Andreas [0017] Paraphrase may be used to modify the utterances of the user to be more likely to create the appropriate agent response (decoder implementation) or it may be used to modify the agent replies to appear more natural to the user (translator implementation)).
The combination of Teserra, Salter, and Andreas does not explicitly, but Bedell teaches: via an application of the identified personal voice assistant specifically designed for communication with the social network platform… ([0057] The user then interacts with the front-end user interface, e.g. speech, text, click, tap, on the front-end device 100. In the case of a web browser, this “interaction event” 150 is transmitted to the server (back-end) via WebSocket connection 600. In the case of a device/application using a REST application programming interface (API), such as Facebook Messenger bot, Amazon Echo device, Google Home device, etc., the user input triggers a call to a platform-dedicated REST API 600 endpoint on the server; and in the case of externally managed applications, such as Messenger or Google Home, application calls are rerouted to REST API endpoints on the server 400. If the request is determined by the system to contain speech audio, the system parses the audio through a Speech-to-Text engine 480 and generates a text string matching the query spoken by the user).
Teserra, Salter, Andreas, and Bedell are considered analogous in the field of text/audio processing. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the teachings of Teserra, Salter, and Andreas to combine the teachings of Bedell because doing so would allow for easier communication with social media platforms using a personal voice assistant by using channel handlers to manage communication between different interfaces, resulting in improved user experience (Bedell [0038] channel handlers to manage communication between web clients, social media applications (apps), Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, and the system server. The system can update a database or data store with every user interaction, and every interaction can be recorded and analyzed to provide a response and/or action back to the user. The system is intended to provide the user with a more natural, intuitive, and efficient means of interacting with software applications, thereby improving the user experience).
Regarding claim 4, the combination of Teserra, Salter, Andreas, and Bedell teaches: the computer-implemented method of claim 1. Teserra further teaches: wherein the second format has a shorter maximum message duration than the first format ([0094] the input to the invoked skill bot is formed simply by removing any portion of the utterance associated with the invocation. For example, "| want to order pizza using Pizza Bot' can be shortened to "I want to order pizza" since "using Pizza Bot" is relevant to the invocation of the pizza bot, but irrelevant to any processing to be performed by the pizza bot).
Regarding claim 8, the combination of Teserra, Salter, Andreas, and Bedell teaches: the computer-implemented method of claim 1. Teserra further teaches: wherein the user input data is raw voice data of the user ([0039] a user utterance 110 can be in audio input or speech form, such as when a user says or speaks something).
Regarding claim 9, the combination of Teserra, Salter, Andreas, and Bedell teaches: the computer-implemented method of claim 8. Teserra further teaches: wherein receiving the user input data includes receiving the raw voice data from a mobile device of the user ([0227] The client devices may include various types of computing systems such as portable handheld devices, general purpose computers such as personal computers and laptops).
Regarding claim 10, the combination of Teserra, Salter, Andreas, and Bedell teaches: the computer-implemented method of claim 8. Teserra further teaches: wherein receiving the user input data includes receiving the raw voice data from the personal voice assistant ([0227] The client devices may include various types of computing systems such as portable handheld devices… Portable handheld devices may include cellular phones, smartphones, (e.g., an iPhone®), tablets (e.g., iPad®), personal digital assistants (PDAs), and the like).
Regarding claim 11, it recites similar limitations as claim 1 and therefore is rejected similarly.
Regarding claim 14, it recites similar limitations as claim 4 and therefore is rejected similarly.
Regarding claim 18, it recites similar limitations as claim 8 and therefore is rejected similarly.
Regarding claim 19, it recites similar limitations as claim 9 and therefore is rejected similarly.
Regarding claim 20, it recites similar limitations as claim 10 and therefore is rejected similarly.
Claims 5-7 and 15-17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Teserra in view of Salter, Andreas, and Bedell, as applied to claims 1, 4, 8-11, 14, and 18-20 above, and further in view of Hanson et al. (US 20220199079 A1; hereinafter referred to as Hanson).
Regarding claim 5, the combination of Teserra, Salter, Andreas, and Bedell teaches: the computer-implemented method of claim 1. The combination of Teserra, Salter, Andreas, and Bedell does not explicitly, but Hanson teaches: determining the one or more intents of the user includes determining that the user intends to communicate information to one or more entities in a social network of the user ([0191] if the determined user intent indicated that the user desired for the requested messages to be read out, the assistant system 140 may begin reading out the requested messages);
generating the one or more voice messages includes generating one or more voice messages containing the information ([0163] if a user wishes to utilize this function of the online social network, the user may provide a voice recording of his or her own voice to provide a status update on the online social network. The recording of the voice-input may be compared to a voice print of the user to determine what words were spoken by the user. The user's privacy setting may specify that such voice recording may be used only for voice-input purposes (e.g., to authenticate the user, to send voice messages, to improve voice recognition in order to use voice-operated features of the online social network));
and providing the one or more voice messages to the personal voice assistant includes causing the personal voice assistant to communicate the information to the one or more entities via the social network platform ([0006] The assistant system may also assist the user to be more engaging with an online social network by providing tools that help the user interact with the online social network (e.g., creating posts, comments, messages)).
Teserra, Salter, Andreas, Bedell, and Hanson are considered analogous in the field of audio/text processing. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the teachings of Teserra, Salter, Andreas, and Bedell to combine the teachings of Hanson because doing so would improve user personalization by using a stored user profile, enabling the user input to include different types of personal information and improving communication with social network platforms (Hanson [0006] The assistant system may create and store a user profile comprising both personal and contextual information associated with the user. In particular embodiments, the assistant system may analyze the user input using natural-language understanding (NLU). The analysis may be based on the user profile of the user for more personalized and context-aware understanding. The assistant system may resolve entities associated with the user input based on the analysis).
Regarding claim 6, the combination of Teserra, Salter, Andreas, Bedell, and Hanson teaches: the computer-implemented method of claim 5. Hanson further teaches: wherein the information includes items to be purchased ([0003] the assistant system may perform concierge-type services (e.g., making dinner reservations, purchasing event tickets, making travel arrangements)).
Regarding claim 7, the combination of Teserra, Salter, Andreas, Bedell, and Hanson teaches: the computer-implemented method of claim 5. Hanson further teaches: wherein the information includes a schedule ([0003] tasks that may be performed by an assistant system may include schedule management).
Regarding claim 15, it recites similar limitations as claim 5 and therefore is rejected similarly.
Regarding claim 16, it recites similar limitations as claim 6 and therefore is rejected similarly.
Regarding claim 17, it recites similar limitations as claim 7 and therefore is rejected similarly.
Conclusion
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Nathan Tengbumroong whose telephone number is (703)756-1725. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Friday, 11:30 am - 8:00 pm EST.
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/NATHAN TENGBUMROONG/Examiner, Art Unit 2654
/HAI PHAN/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2654
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