DETAILED ACTION
This communication is in response to the Application filed on 11/04/2022. Claims 1-20 are pending and have been examined.
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 .
Information Disclosure Statement
The IDS dated 11/04/2022 has been considered and placed in the application file.
Claim Interpretation
The claims in this application are given their broadest reasonable interpretation using the plain meaning of the claim language in light of the specification as it would be understood by one of ordinary skill in the art. The broadest reasonable interpretation of a claim element (also commonly referred to as a claim limitation) is limited by the description in the specification.
The following terms in the claims have been given the following interpretations in light of the specification:
Word density function model: paragraph [0037], “In an embodiment of the invention, the word density function model is associated with an array of integers which maps a co-occurrence of related terms which occur in the real-time chat 212. In further or alternative embodiments of the invention, the word density model is associated with selectively one or more of a topic bundle likelihood, a term frequency, a bigram count, a trigram count, a probability density function, and a scale of a probability density function.”
Thus, a word density function model is any function that models a body of text using co-occurrence, topic bundle likelihood, a term frequency, a bigram count, a trigram count, a probability density function, or a scale of a probability density function. This definition is used for purposes of searching for prior art, but cannot be incorporated into the claims.
Should applicant wish different definitions, Applicant should point to the portions of the specification that clearly show a different definition.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
Claims 5, 6 and 19 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claim 5 recites the limitation "the location". There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim. Further, it is unclear to whether “the location” refers to a location of the similar question, a location of the answer to the similar question, or a location of one of the one or more persistent similar public chat channels.
Claim 6 depends either directly or indirectly from the rejection of Claim 5, therefore it is also rejected.
Claim 19 recites the limitations "the location", "the similar question", and “the answer to the similar question”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for these limitations in the claim.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-5, 7-18, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more. All of the claims are method claims (1-13), apparatus/machine claims (14-20) or manufacture claim under (Step 1), but under Step 2A all of these claims recite abstract ideas and specifically mental processes. These mental processes are more particularly recited in claims 1, 14, and 18 as:
analyzing by the computing device the real-time chat conversation to generate a word density function model…
determining by the computing device one or more persistent conversations held in similar public chat channels based upon the generated word density function model …
presenting by the computing device the determined one or more persistent similar public chat channels to a user…
Under Step 2A Prong One, claims 1, 14, and 18 are directed to an abstract idea and specifically a mental process. As detailed above, the steps of analyzing, determining, presenting, etc. may be practically performed in the human mind with the use of a physical aid such as a pen and paper. For example, a human could listen to a conversation between a first group of people, model the conversation by tallying the term frequency of each term of the conversation, remember a similar conversation between a second group people based on the term frequency tally, and then recommend the first group of people to join the conversation of the second group of people.
Under Step 2A Prong Two, this judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because claims 1-20 do not recite additional elements that integrate the exception into a practical application. In particular, claims 1, 14, and 18 recite the additional elements of a computing device (¶ [0014]), computer messaging software (¶ [0028]), a computer program product (¶ [0012]), non-transitory computer-readable storage media storing program instructions (¶ [0012]), and a processor (¶ [0015]). These additional elements are recited at a high level of generality and merely equate to “apply it” or otherwise merely uses a generic computer as a tool to perform an abstract which are not indicative of integration into a practical application as per MPEP 2106.05(f). Further, claims 1, 14, and 18 recite the additional element of “accessing…” which amounts to insignificant extra-solution activities which are not indicative of integration into a practical application as per MPEP 2106.05(g). Accordingly, these additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea. The claim is directed to an abstract idea.
Under Step 2B, the claims do not recite additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. As discussed above with respect to the integration of the abstract idea into a practical application, the additional elements of using a computer is noted as a general computer {computing device (¶ [0014]); computer messaging software (¶ [0028]); computer program product (¶ [0012]); non-transitory computer-readable storage media storing program instructions (¶ [0012]; processor (¶ [0015])}. Mere instructions to apply an exception using a generic computer component cannot provide an inventive concept. Further, the additional limitations in the claims noted above are directed towards insignificant extra-solution activities. The claims are not patent eligible.
With respect to claims 2 and 15, the claim relates to the conversation including a question. This relates to a person in the first group of people asking a question. No additional limitations are present. The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With respect to claims 3 and 16, the claim relates to the word density function model analyzing the question. This relates to the human narrowing their term frequency analysis to only the person’s question. No additional limitations are present. The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With respect to claims 4 and 17, the claim relates to the similar public channel comprising a similar question and an answer to the similar question. This relates to the human only connecting similar conversations by noticing similar questions between the two conversations. No additional limitations are present. The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With respect to claim 5, the claim relates to redirecting users to the similar public chat channel. This relates to the human guiding the first group of people to the location of the second group of people. No additional limitations are present. The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With respect to claims 7-9 and 20, the claim relates to specifying mathematical limitations of the word density function model. These limitations amount to mathematical concepts which not patent-eligible subject matter as per MPEP 2106.04(a)(2)(I). No additional limitations are present. The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With respect to claims 10, the claim relates to a participant being an artificial intelligence chatbot. The limitation of “an artificial intelligence chatbot” is recited at a high level of generality (¶ [0028]) and merely equates to “apply it” or otherwise merely uses a generic computer as a tool to perform an abstract which are not indicative of integration into a practical application as per MPEP 2106.05(f). No additional limitations are present. The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With respect to claims 11, the claim relates to the conversation being a direct message between users. This relates to the human eavesdropping in on a personal conversation between two friends and analyzing the conversation to determine similarities to other conversations. No additional limitations are present. The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With respect to claims 12, the claim relates to the conversation occurring in a public chat channel. This relates to the human analyzing the conversation of a friend group communicating in a public space. No additional limitations are present. The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With respect to claims 13, the claim relates to the conversation comprising one of text, speech or images.. This relates to the human analyzing the audible conversation of a first group of people. No additional limitations are present. The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
For all of the above reasons, taken alone or in combination, claims 1-5, 7-18, and 20 recite non-statutory mental processes and mathematical concepts.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1-5, 9, and 12-18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by US Patent 12223002 A1 (Badjatiya et al.).
Claim 1
Regarding claim 1, Badjatiya et al. disclose a method using computing device to determine a similarity between a chat conversation and one or more other chat conversations in public chat channels within computer messaging software and automatically presenting the similar public chat channels to a user (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (6), "A method for recommending online conversations relevant a given query post can be implemented as a computer application that is incorporated into the software that supports the online forum, and would be automatically invoked when a user posts a query."), the method comprising:
accessing by a computing device a real-time chat conversation (Badjatiya et al. Claim 1, "A method begins by receiving, at step 10, by an online forum server, a query post from a user of an online forum." ¶ (15), "The term “query” or “post” refers to a document submitted by a user to an Internet forum or message board, which is a computer implemented online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages or documents."), the chat conversation taking place between a plurality of participants (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (15)-(16), "The term “query” or “post” refers to a document submitted by a user to an Internet forum or message board, which is a computer implemented online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages or documents. The term “online forum” refers to a computer-implemented Internet forum, discussion group or community in which the subject of the posts is directed to a particular subject matter, such as a technology.");
analyzing by the computing device the real-time chat conversation to generate a word density function model modeling at least a part of the real-time chat conversation (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (25), "a query is posted in an online forum server that serves as a reference post 111 that is split into a body 113 and a subject 114. A body encoding module 125 calculates a body embedding 127 of the body 113.... An exemplary, non-limiting body encoding module 125 is a tf-idf encoding module" TF-IDF is considered analogous to a word density function model (see Claim Interpretation));
accessing by the computing device one or more persistent conversations held in a plurality of public chat channels (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (26), "A contextual similarity scoring module 140 compares the body embedding 127 of the reference post 111 against a body embedding 137 of the body 133 of a post 131 in the complete corpus 130 of posts in the online forum to calculate a contextual relevance score");
determining by the computing device one or more persistent conversations held in similar public chat channels based upon the generated word density function model (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (30), "the cosine similarity between the TF-IDF vectors of each of the online forum posts and a TF-IDF vector of the query post is computed by a contextual similarity scoring module, and a shortlist of the
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relevant online forum posts with maximum similarity between the body context of the query post and the body contexts of the online forum posts are selected by the contextual similarity scoring module."); and
presenting by the computing device the determined one or more persistent similar public chat channels to a user (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (37), "After the boosting stage, the top
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posts are selected out of the
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selected online posts that constitute the final list of recommendations. ... The top
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selected online posts are displayed to the user.").
Claim 2
Regarding claim 2, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. further disclose wherein the real-time chat conversation includes a question from a participant of the plurality of participants (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (29), "The query post may be a question from the user that the user wants answered by finding other posts from a set of online posts 11 in the online forum that are relevant to the query post.").
Claim 3
Regarding claim 3, the rejection of claim 2 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. further disclose wherein the word density function model represents an analysis of the question from the participant (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (25), "a query is posted in an online forum server that serves as a reference post 111 that is split into a body 113 and a subject 114. A body encoding module 125 calculates a body embedding 127 of the body 113.... An exemplary, non-limiting body encoding module 125 is a tf-idf encoding module" A query is considered analogous to a question. Therefore, the body of a query post is considered analogous to a question).
Claim 4
Regarding claim 4, the rejection of claim 3 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. further disclose wherein the determined one or more similar public channels present a similar question and an answer to the similar question (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (42), "In some forums, user post questions and either experts or users of the forum post answers to those. ... Since an approach according to an embodiment searches for semantically similar posts, it identifies similar posts that were answered by experts and then recommends similar solutions when an expert is unavailable").
Claim 5
Regarding claim 5, the rejection of claim 4 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. further disclose wherein the computing device automatically redirects the user to the location in the one or more persistent similar public chat channels to find the similar question and the answer to the similar question (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (54), "In FIG. 4A, the subject of the post is “All my scans have disappeared”, and the body of the post is below the subject. ... related conversations returned by a model according to an embodiment are shown on the right." ¶ (50)-(53), "An A/B test was carried out for a selected (US-region) audience to evaluate the engagement of the users on related conversations component, i.e., a click through rate, generated by a model according to an embodiment versus those generated by an OOTB model. 28,515 clicks were observed on a related conversations component powered by a model according to an embodiment vs 23,405 clicks on an already existing OOTB component. … it can be observed that there is a 22% increase in user engagement, as measured by user clicks, a 19% decrease in the time it takes to find an answer, resulting in faster resolution times, and a 20% drop in the visits to the online chat help.” Clicking a related conversation to find an answer faster implies redirecting a user to a location in the one or more forums to find a similar question and answer to the similar question).
Claim 9
Regarding claim 9, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. further disclose wherein the word density function model is associated with selectively one or more of the following: a topic bundle likelihood, a term frequency (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (30), "the cosine similarity between the TF-IDF vectors of each of the online forum posts and a TF-IDF vector of the query post is computed by a contextual similarity scoring module, and a shortlist of the
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relevant online forum posts with maximum similarity between the body context of the query post and the body contexts of the online forum posts are selected by the contextual similarity scoring module."), a bigram count, a trigram count, a probability density function, a shape of a probability density function, and a scale of a probability density function.
Claim 12
Regarding claim 12, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. further disclose wherein the real-time chat conversation occurs in a first public chat channel the plurality of participants are part of (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (15)-(16), "The term “query” or “post” refers to a document submitted by a user to an Internet forum or message board, which is a computer implemented online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages or documents. The term “online forum” refers to a computer-implemented Internet forum, discussion group or community in which the subject of the posts is directed to a particular subject matter, such as a technology.").
Claim 13
Regarding claim 13, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. further disclose wherein the real-time chat conversation comprises selectively one or more of the following: a text chat (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (15)-(16), "The term “query” or “post” refers to a document submitted by a user to an Internet forum or message board, which is a computer implemented online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages or documents."), a voice chat, and images.
Claim 14
Regarding claim 14, Badjatiya et al. disclose a computer program product using a computing device (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (57), "In particular embodiments, the processor(s) 52 includes hardware for executing instructions, such as those making up a computer program."), and
one or more non-transitory computer-readable storage media and program instructions stored on the one or more non-transitory computer-readable storage media (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (59), "The computing device 500 includes a storage device 506 for storing data or instructions. As an example, and not by way of limitation, the storage device 506 can include a non-transitory storage medium described above.").
Claim 15
Regarding claim 15, the rejection of claim 14 is incorporated. The limitations of claim 15 are similar to that of claim 2 and therefore are rejected for similar reasons as described above.
Claim 16
Regarding claim 16, the rejection of claim 15 is incorporated. The limitations of claim 16 are similar to that of claim 2 and therefore are rejected for similar reasons as described above.
Claim 17
Regarding claim 17, the rejection of claim 16 is incorporated. The limitations of claim 17 are similar to that of claim 3 and therefore are rejected for similar reasons as described above.
Claim 18
Regarding claim 18, Badjatiya et al. disclose a computer system for a determination of similarity between a chat conversation and one or more other chat conversations in public chat channels within computer messaging software and automatically presenting the similar public chat channels to a user, the computer system comprising:
one or more computer processors (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (57), "In particular embodiments, the processor(s) 52 includes hardware for executing instructions, such as those making up a computer program.");
one or more computer-readable storage media (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (59), "The computing device 500 includes a storage device 506 for storing data or instructions. As an example, and not by way of limitation, the storage device 506 can include a non-transitory storage medium described above."); and
program instructions stored on the computer-readable storage media for execution by at least one of the one or more processors (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (57), "In particular embodiments, the processor(s) 52 includes hardware for executing instructions, such as those making up a computer program.").
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 6 and 19 are rejected over US Patent 12223002 B2 (Badjatiya et al.) in view of US Patent 9697281 B1 (Palmon et al.).
Claim 6
Regarding claim 6, the rejection of claim 5 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. disclose all the elements of the claimed invention as stated above. Badjatiya et al. further disclose wherein the one or more persistent similar public chat channels are located in a graphical user interface (Badjatiya et al. ¶ (54), "In FIG. 4A, the subject of the post is “All my scans have disappeared”, and the body of the post is below the subject. The related conversations returned by a conventional model are listed on the left, and the 9 related conversations returned by a model according to an embodiment are shown on the right." See Figures 4A and 4B) [and the graphical user interface automatically scrolls to the location to find the similar question and the answer to the similar question].
Badjatiya et al. do not explicitly disclose all of a GUI that automatically scrolls to a location.
However, Palmon et al. disclose a graphical user interface that automatically scrolls to a location (Palmon et al. ¶ (24), "In 217, the client-side process 200 receives the served answer and displays it on the display 107 of the client processing system 101. In one version, when the answer entity is part of a Web page, in 217, the client-side process, e.g., operating on a browser component, navigates to the correct answer entity on the website, scrolls down automatically to the relevant portion on the Web page and highlights it.") to find the similar question (Palmon et al. ¶ (44), "The query server 505 is operative ... finding entries having a Query field that matches the so-far entered user query.") and the answer to the similar question (Palmon et al. ¶ (46), "For each keystroke of the user, the code in search UI 507 is operative to submit a query for the server processing system 131 and to receive probable answers. ... responsive to the user's selecting one of the displayed answers, element 507 is operative to send the URL to the server, and then to navigate to the correct Web page of the answer, and in one embodiment, to add one or more parameters indicative of the position of the answer, e.g., by highlighting at least some of the answer. The browser element of the loaded Web page will continue the navigation and scroll to the position of the answer in the Web page.").
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the time of the effective filing date of the claimed invention of the instant application to modify Badjatiya et al.’s conversation recommendation system to incorporate Palmon et al.’s graphical user interface.
The suggestion/motivation for doing so would have been that, “Each answer may link to a specific portion of the Web page rather than to the whole Web page, in order to add precision,” as noted by the Palmon et al. disclosure in paragraph (13).
Claim 19
Regarding claim 19, the rejection of claim 18 is incorporated. The limitations of claim 19 are similar in scope to that of claim 6 and therefore are rejected for similar reasons as described above.
Claim 7, 8, and 20 are rejected over US Patent 12223002 B2 (Badjatiya et al.) in view of US Patent Publication 20200028925 A1 (Monge Nunez et al.).
Claim 7
Regarding claim 7, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. disclose all the elements of the claimed invention as stated above.
Badjatiya et al. do not explicitly disclose all of topic modeling, corpus linguistics, reduce word vectors integer, or model probabilistic co-occurrence.
However, Monge Nunez et al. disclose model probabilistic co-occurrence (Monge Nunez et al. ¶ [0057]-[0058], "the social media interactions of the user may be input into one or more cross co-occurrence matrices and used to do a search (i.e., a cross co-occurrence query) for similar interactions by other users. ... As the user social media interactions database grows, machine learning may be periodically repeated to further train (or retrain) the system and create new cross co-occurrence model and matrices to drive recommendations, for example, using existing APACHE MAHOUT™ by The APACHE® Software Foundation.").
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the time of the effective filing date of the claimed invention of the instant application to modify Badjatiya et al.’s conversation recommendation system to include Monge Nunez et al.’s model probabilistic co-occurrence because such a modification is the result of simple substitution of one known element for another producing a predictable result. More specifically, Badjatiya et al.’s word density function model and Monge Nunez et al.’s model probabilistic co-occurrence perform the same general and predictable function, the predictable function being identifying similar user interactions across public online conversations. Since each individual element and its function are shown in the prior art, albeit shown in separate references, the difference between the claimed subject matter and the prior art rests not on any individual element or function but in the very combination itself - that is in the substitution of Badjatiya et al.’s word density function model by replacing it with Monge Nunez et al.’s model probabilistic co-occurrence. Thus, the simple substitution of one known element for another producing a predictable result renders the claim obvious.
Claim 8
Regarding claim 8, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. disclose all the elements of the claimed invention as stated above.
Badjatiya et al. do not explicitly disclose all of an array of integers which maps a co-occurrence of related terms in the real-time chat conversation.
However, Monge Nunez et al. disclose an array of integers which maps a co-occurrence of related terms in the real-time chat conversation (Monge Nunez et al. ¶ [0057]-[0058], "the social media interactions of the user may be input into one or more cross co-occurrence matrices and used to do a search (i.e., a cross co-occurrence query) for similar interactions by other users.” A co-occurrence matrix is considered analogous to an array of integers which map a co-occurrence).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the time of the effective filing date of the claimed invention of the instant application to modify Badjatiya et al.’s conversation recommendation system to incorporate Monge Nunez et al.’s co-occurrence matrices.
The suggestion/motivation for doing so is similar to the suggestion/motivation described above with respect to claim 7.
Claim 20
Regarding claim 20, the rejection of claim 18 is incorporated. The limitations of claim 20 are similar in scope to that of claim 8 and therefore are rejected for similar reasons as described above.
Claim 10 is rejected over US Patent 12223002 B2 (Badjatiya et al.) in view of US Patent Publication US 20190260694 A1 (Londhe et al.).
Claim 10
Regarding claim 10, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. disclose all the elements of the claimed invention as stated above.
Badjatiya et al. do not explicitly disclose all of an artificial intelligence chatbot.
However, Londhe et al. disclose wherein one or more of the plurality of participants in a real-time chat conversation is an artificial intelligence chatbot (Londhe et al. ¶ [0038], "The answer posting module 126 can be or can utilize a conversational agent or chatbot that processes user queries and presents answers in the chat room 202. The chatbot can provide answers to user questions and/or can suggest relevant queries in an alternative case.").
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the time of the effective filing date of the claimed invention of the instant application to modify Badjatiya et al.’s messaging software to incorporate Londhe et al.’s chatbot.
The suggestion/motivation for doing so would have been that, “extracted chat data can be utilized for a variety of purposes, such as, for example, building chatbots, wikification (e.g., creating a wiki), aiding customer support, improving user engagement, understanding user interests and concerns, and measuring or evaluating the success of new game features,” as noted by the Londhe et al. disclosure in paragraph [0022].
Claim 11 is rejected over US Patent 12223002 B2 (Badjatiya et al.) in view of US Patent Publication US 20200234694 A1 (Griffiths et al.).
Claim 11
Regarding claim 11, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated. Badjatiya et al. disclose all the elements of the claimed invention as stated above.
Badjatiya et al. do not explicitly disclose all of a direct message between users.
However, Griffiths et al. disclose wherein the real-time chat conversation occurs in a direct message between users (Griffiths et al. ¶ [0078], "Each conversation may include one or more messages between two users, between more than two users, or between a user and a computing system that provides automated natural language responses to the user." A computing system that provides automated natural language responses is considered analogous to an artificial intelligence chatbot).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the time of the effective filing date of the claimed invention of the instant application to modify Badjatiya et al.’s conversation recommendation method to include Griffiths et al.’s direct messages because such a modification is the result of combining prior art elements according to known methods to yield predictable results. More specifically, Badjatiya et al.’s corpus of conversations as modified by Griffiths et al.’s direct message can yield a predictable result of widening the method’s applicability since recommendations could be tailored to direct message conversations in addition to public forum posts. Thus, a person of ordinary skill would have appreciated including in Badjatiya et al.’s conversation recommendation method the ability to do Griffiths et al.’s direct messages since the claimed invention is merely a combination of old elements, and in the combination each element merely would have performed the same function as it did separately, and one of ordinary skill in the art would have recognized that the results of the combination were predictable.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JACOB B VOGT whose telephone number is (571)272-7028. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Friday 9:30am - 7pm EST.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Paras D Shah can be reached at (571)270-1650. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/JACOB B VOGT/Examiner, Art Unit 2653
/Paras D Shah/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2653
12/06/2025