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 Amendments
This office action responds to the amendments filed on April 27, 2026 for application 18/387,629. Claims 1 and 19 are amended, and claims 1-8 and 19-21, claims 9-18 are withdrawn, and claims 1-8 and 19-21 remain open for examination.
Response to Arguments
The Examiner has fully considered the Applicant’s arguments filed on April 27, 2026, and the Examiner responds as provided below.
Regarding the Applicant’s response at page 9 of the Remarks that concerns the objections to the drawings, the amendments and new drawing sheet cure the deficiencies and the objections are withdrawn.
Regarding the Applicant’s response at pages 9 and 10 of the Remarks that concerns the § 103 rejection, the Applicant’s arguments in conjunction with the claim amendments are persuasive, and consequently the Examiner conducted a new prior art search. The Applicant’s arguments are now moot with respect to the pending claims because the arguments do not apply to one of the references currently used in the rejection of the aforementioned claims as detailed below.
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.
The following conventions apply to the mapping of the prior art to the claims:
Italicized text – claim language.
Parenthetical plain text – Examiner’s citation and explanation.
Citation without an explanation – an explanation has been previously provided for the respective limitation(s).
Quotation marks – language quoted from a prior art reference.
Underlining – language quoted from a claim.
Brackets – material altered from either a prior art reference or a claim, which includes the Examiner’s explanation that relates a claim limitation to the quoted material of a reference.
Braces – a limitation taught by another reference, but the limitation is presented with the mapping of the instant reference for context.
Numbered superscript – a first phrase to be moved upwards to the primary reference analysis.
Lettered superscript – a second phrase to be moved after the movement of the first phrase from which it was lifted, or more succinctly, move numbered material first, lettered material last.
A. Claims 1 and 19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Drake et al. (US 11,024,299, “Drake”) in view of Medalion et al. (US 2021/0125615, “Medalion”), and further in view of Lesner et al. (US 10,970,414, “Lesner”).
Regarding Claim 1
Drake discloses
A method (abstract) implemented by one or more processors (Col. 14:58-15:2, “the redaction delivery module [of the method] 124 may each include at least one memory that stores computer-executable instructions and at least one processor configured to…”), the method comprising:
receiving, via a client device and during a human to computer dialog session between a user and an automated assistant, one or more utterances belonging to the human to computer dialog session (Figs. 1 & 4, Col. 18:35-41, “At block 402, utterance data may be received by an utterance detection module. In some embodiments, the utterance data comprises an utterance, such as a command, a question, or a conversation [within a human to computer dialog session between a user and an automated assistant; and Col. 6:47-57, “For example, x might represent a search query, a voice command issued to a virtual assistant, part of a dialogue with an AI agent [automated assistant], etc.”);
processing the one or more utterances to generate a transcript for each utterance from the one or more utterances (Fig. 1, Col. 5:17-42, “In some embodiments, the redaction module 110 may receive or generate a text transcription 114 based on the utterance [processed] 104 according to one or more embodiments.”);
for the transcript of each utterance from the one or more utterances (Fig. 1, Col. 5:17-42):
identifying one or more…1 words in the transcript that potentially convey personally identifiable information (PII) (Col. 6:47-57, “In particular, x will contain semantic information about the intent the user is trying to convey, but it might also contain [identifiable] private information [words] like passwords, shipping addresses, phone numbers, and other types of personally identifiable information.”),
2 …;
redacting one or more other words in the transcript based on one or more redacting rules, while preserving the one or more words flagged as not conveying PII, to generate a redacted transcript having one or more redacted slots that correspond to the one or more redacted words (Col. 5:43-60, “In some embodiments, the redaction module 110 determines a MadLib-style replacement 120 (redaction) [based on one or more redaction rules] for one or more elements [one or more other words] in the private portion 118 [of the transcript, with this treatment preserving the one or more words flagged as not conveying PII as the words are not in the “private portion”]. In some embodiments, this MadLib-style replacement 120 may be selected from a same context or category of the private portion [one] 118. For example, a flavor such as ‘sour’ may be replaced [within the redacted slots that correspond to the one or more redacted words] by another flavor such as ‘sweet.’”; and “In some embodiments, the redaction module 110 determines a new text transcription 122 that combines the public portion 116 of the text transcription 114 with the MadLib-style replacement 120. As depicted in FIG. 1, for example, the new text transcription 122 may state, ‘My password is one four nine eight.’”);
3 …; and
a …, using a generative model trained based on redacted data,… (Col. 2:37-56, “Further, as used herein, MadLib [based on redacted data] includes any suitable privacy preserving generative model [with models relying upon the using of training] for in-place redatction, for example, for identifying a word, subphrase, phrase or sentence with an alternative word, subphrase, phrase or sentence having the same or similar semantic context so as to preserve sentiment.”)
4 ….
Drake doesn’t disclose
1 …candidate {words in the transcript that potentially convey personally identifiable information (Drake Col. 6:47-57)}…
2 determining a frequency of the one or more candidate words in a log of reference transcripts generated from historical human-to-computer dialogs across a plurality of distinct users, and based on the frequency satisfying a threshold, flagging one or more of the candidate words as not conveying PII;
3 processing the redacted transcript as input, … a, to generate output corresponding to a modified transcript that has the one or more redacted slots of the redacted transcript filled with PII-free content;
4 generating one or more training instances based on the modified transcript of each utterance from the one or more utterances.
Medalion, however, discloses
1 …candidate {words in the transcript that potentially convey personally identifiable information}…(¶ [0094], “In some embodiments, the original text strings from production data collection 122, or filtered and/or tokenized text strings, may be provided to pattern-based matchers 106, which may flag potential PII data using, for example, regular expressions. The flagged data may then be stored in flagged data collection 126 and then reviewed by a human reviewer at 306, as described above.”)
3 processing the redacted transcript as input,…a , to generate output corresponding to a modified transcript that has the one or more redacted slots of the redacted transcript filled with PII-free content (¶ [0091], “In some cases, flagger/redactor 110 may generate redacted text strings, which are sent back to production data collection 122 to replace the un-redacted text strings that include PII [to create a modified transcript that has redacted slots filled with PII-free content]. Further, the redacted text strings [to create the PII-free transcript] may be provided [and subsequently processed as input] for other uses 308, such as training, generation of other models [that generate output], further analysis, and the like.”);
4 generating one or more training instances based on the modified transcript of each utterance from the one or more utterances (¶ [0091], “In some cases, flagger/redactor 110 may generate redacted text strings, which are sent back to production data collection 122 to replace the un-redacted text strings that include PII. Further, the redacted text strings may be provided for other uses 308, such as training [to generate training instances based on the modified transcript], generation of other models, further analysis, and the like.”).
Regarding the combination of Drake and Medalion, 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 privacy system of Drake to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the privacy system of Drake, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a privacy redaction feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the privacy system of Medalion, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the privacy redaction feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the privacy redaction feature to the base privacy system of Drake, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Lesner, however, discloses
2 determining a frequency of the one or more candidate words in a log of reference transcripts generated from historical human-to-computer dialogs across a plurality of distinct users, and based on the frequency satisfying a threshold, flagging one or more of the candidate words as not conveying PII (Col. 3:45-4:9, “Similarly, statistical PII detection methods may identify sets of data elements [candidate words] whose frequency of co-occurrence within a user-specific dataset is significantly higher than the frequency co-occurrence of those set of data elements in a multi-user dataset [across a plurality of distinct users] that includes the user-specific data. For example, if the rate of co-occurrence of strings ‘John Smith’ and ‘123-45-6789’ in a dataset associated with ‘John Smith’ may be significantly higher than the rate of co-occurrence of ‘John Smith’ and ‘123-45-6789’ in a dataset including records for many users, including John Smith. This disparity in frequencies may form the basis of a prediction [that rely upon a threshold] that ‘John Smith’ and ‘123-45-6789’ are PII [or in the alternative case, not conveying PII]. This prediction can be used to proactively protect such information.”);
Regarding the combination of Drake-Medalion and Lesner, 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 privacy system of Drake-Medalion to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the privacy system of Drake-Medalion, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a PII-statistical feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the privacy system of Lesner, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the PII-statistical feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the PII-statistical feature to the base privacy system of Drake-Medalion, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Regarding Independent Claim 19
With respect to claim 19, a corresponding reasoning as given earlier for claim 1 applies, mutatis mutandis, to the subject matter of claim 19. Therefore, claim 19 is rejected, for similar reasons, under the grounds set forth for claim 1.
B. Claims 2 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Drake in view of Medalion and Lesner, and further in view of Thomson et al. (US 10,573,312, “Thomson”) and Arnold (US 2004/0199782, “Arnold”).
Regarding Claim 2
Drake in view of Medalion, and further in view of Lesner (“Drake-Medalion-Lesner”) discloses the method of claim 1, and Drake further discloses
wherein redacting the one or more other words in the transcript (Col. 5:43-60) further comprises:
1….
Drake-Medalion-Lesner doesn’t disclose
1 determining whether the transcript includes any entity name that has been referenced more than once throughout the one or more utterances, and
in response to determining that the transcript includes an entity name that has been referenced more than once throughout the one or more utterances, replacing the entity name with a numbered reference slot.
Thomson, however, discloses
1 determining whether the {transcript (Drake)} includes any entity name that has been referenced more than once throughout the one or more utterances (Col. 250:31-46, “A term may be extracted from an utterance of a first participant in a communication session. A language model may be adjusted to give a higher weight to the extracted term.”; and Col. 202:47-53, “In a variation on replacing words with class tags, class member frequencies [been referenced more than once] may be tracked in the n-gram table or in a separate table. For example, if ‘David’ is replaced with ‘_name_, [entity name]’ the counter for the unigram ‘David’ may be incremented or n-gram counter 6508 may keep a separate table for filtered names, each with an associated counter.”), and
in response to determining that the transcript includes an entity name that has been referenced more than once throughout the one or more utterances (Cols. 202:47-53 & 250:31-46), …a
Regarding the combination of Drake-Medalion-Lesner and Thomson, 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 privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a term-frequency feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the transcription system of Thomson, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the term-frequency feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the term-frequency feature to the base privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Arnold, however, discloses
a …replacing the entity name with a numbered reference slot (¶ [0031], “In order to track and correlate the filtered x-ray to the patient in the present example, a random number [referenced number slot corresponding to the redacted text of Drake] may be substituted [replaced] for the filtered PII [entity name] and keyed back to the file system for tracking with the patient.”).
Regarding the combination of Drake-Medalion-Lesner-Thomson and Arnold, 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 privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner-Thomson to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner-Thomson, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a numbering feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the transcription system of Arnold, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the numbering feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the numbering feature to the base privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner-Thomson, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Regarding Dependent Claim 20
With respect to claim 20, a corresponding reasoning as given earlier for claim 2 applies, mutatis mutandis, to the subject matter of claim 20. Therefore, claim 20 is rejected, for similar reasons, under the grounds set forth for claim 2.
C. Claims 3-5 and 21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Drake in view of Medalion and Lesner, and further in view of Gentleman et al. (US 2022/0207163, “Gentleman”).
Regarding Claim 3
Drake-Medalion-Lesner discloses the method of claim 1, and Drake further discloses
further comprising: prior to identifying the one or more candidate words in the transcript that potentially convey PII (Drake Col. 6:47-57, Medalion ¶ [0094]),…1
Regarding the combination of Drake and Medalion, the rationale to combine is the same as provided for claim 1 due to the overlapping subject matter of claims 1 and 3.
Drake-Medalion-Lesner doesn’t disclose
1 …removing stop words from the transcript.
Gentleman, however, discloses
1 …removing stop words from the transcript (¶ [0124], “For example, an application may retrieve a first data object and parse the text elements of the first data object to remove stop words, split strings of text characters into words, and then convert the individual words to all lower case characters to, thereby, generate a second data object that better matches a data structure associated with one or more data classification models.”).
Regarding the combination of Drake-Medalion-Lesner and Gentleman, 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 privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a stop-word feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the transcription system of Gentleman, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the stop-word feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the stop-word feature to the base privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Regarding Claim 4
Drake-Medalion-Lesner discloses the method of claim 1, and Drake further discloses
further comprising:
prior to identifying the one or more candidate words in the transcript that potentially convey PII (Drake Col. 6:47-57, Medalion ¶ [0094]),…1
Regarding the combination of Drake and Medalion, the rationale to combine is the same as provided for claim 1 due to the overlapping subject matter of claims 1 and 4.
Drake-Medalion-Lesner doesn’t disclose
1 …lemmatizing the transcript.
Gentleman, however, discloses
1 …lemmatizing the transcript (¶ [0120], “In some embodiments, a machine learning pipeline associated with a natural language processing model may be configured for lemmatization and/or stemming of words.”).
Regarding the combination of Drake-Medalion-Lesner and Gentleman, 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 privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a lemmatization feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the transcription system of Gentleman, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the lemmatization feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the lemmatization feature to the base privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Regarding Claim 5
Drake-Medalion-Lesner discloses the method of claim 1, and Drake further discloses
further comprising:
prior to identifying the one or more candidate words in the transcript that potentially convey PII (Drake Col. 6:47-57, Medalion ¶ [0094]),…1
Regarding the combination of Drake and Medalion, the rationale to combine is the same as provided for claim 1 due to the overlapping subject matter of claims 1 and 5.
Drake-Medalion-Lesner doesn’t disclose
1 …converting all uppercase in the transcript to lowercase.
Gentleman, however, discloses
1 …converting all uppercase in the transcript to lowercase (¶ [0124], “For example, an application may retrieve a first data object and parse the text elements of the first data object to remove stop words, split strings of text characters into words, and then convert the individual words to all lower case characters to, thereby, generate a second data object that better matches a data structure associated with one or more data classification models.”).
Regarding the combination of Drake-Medalion-Lesner and Gentleman, 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 privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a lowercase conversion feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the transcription system of Gentleman, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the lowercase conversion feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the lowercase conversion feature to the base privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Regarding Dependent Claim 21
With respect to claim 21, a corresponding reasoning as given earlier for claim 3 applies, mutatis mutandis, to the subject matter of claim 21. Therefore, claim 21 is rejected, for similar reasons, under the grounds set forth for claim 3.
D. Claim 6 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Drake in view of Medalion and Lesner, and further in view of Lunsford (US 10,255,424, “Lunsford”).
Regarding Claim 6
Drake-Medalion-Lesner discloses the method of claim 1, and Drake further discloses
further comprising:
prior to identifying the one or more candidate words in the transcript that potentially convey PII (Drake Col. 6:47-57, Medalion ¶ [0094]),…1
Regarding the combination of Drake and Medalion, the rationale to combine is the same as provided for claim 1 due to the overlapping subject matter of claims 1 and 6.
Drake-Medalion-Lesner doesn’t disclose
1 …removing non-alphanumeric tokens from the transcript.
Lunsford, however, discloses
1 …removing non-alphanumeric tokens from the transcript (Col. 13:28-46, “FIG. 6 illustrates a flowchart 600 and a diagram of how text fields can be scrubbed, according to some embodiments. First, the process may include removing any non-alphanumeric characters (602). This step can remove hyphens, symbols, punctuation, and other non-alphanumeric characters that do not serve to identify the issuing computer system. The method may also include removing known tokens from the descriptions (604). A blacklist of known tokens can be compared to each character string in the description, and these tokens can be removed.”).
Regarding the combination of Drake-Medalion-Lesner and Lunsford, 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 privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a non-alphanumeric token feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the transcription system of Lunsford, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the non-alphanumeric token feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the non-alphanumeric token feature to the base privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
E. Claim 7 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Drake in view of Medalion and Lesner, and further in view of Liu (US 2025/0042431, “Liu”).
Regarding Claim 7
Drake-Medalion-Lesner discloses the method of claim 1, and Drake further discloses
wherein the one or more redacting rules (Col. 5:43-60) include…1
Drake-Medalion-Lesner doesn’t disclose
1 …a modified Apriori algorithm.
Liu, however, discloses
1 …a modified Apriori algorithm (¶ [0031], “The perception system 130 can include a number of components and/or modules that facilitate detection and localization of sound-producing objects using sound sensing and processing [via an algorithm], as described herein. In some implementations, perception system 130 can deploy an SSM 132 that uses audio data Y collected by microphones 119 and apportions this data among multiple sources j=1 . . . N, such that Y=X1+ . . . +XK, where the number of sources K and types of those sources currently present in the driving environment are not known apriori. The perception system 130 can also deploy a sound classification model (SCM) 134 that performs classification of sources j, e.g., among various predefined (during training of SCM 134) classes, such as sirens, noise, private speech, valid public speech, and/or the like. Private speech redaction module 136 can facilitate complete removal or partial suppression of identified (by SCM 134) private speech audio, e.g., by ensuring that private speech audio is not stored for more than a transient time (e.g., a fraction of a second necessary to determine that the speech is private), redacting periodic segments of speech such that the remaining portions of speech cannot be used for determination of the content of speech, and/or the like, or a combination of these techniques.”).
Regarding the combination of Drake-Medalion-Lesner and Liu, 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 privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of an apriori algorithm feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the transcription system of Liu, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the apriori algorithm feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the apriori algorithm feature to the base privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
F. Claim 8 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Drake in view of Medalion and Lesner, and further in view of Cuomo (US 12,455,980, “Cuomo”).
Regarding Claim 8
Drake-Medalion-Lesner discloses the method of claim 1, and Medalion further discloses
further comprising: …1 based on the one or more generated training instances (¶ [0091]).
Regarding the combination of Drake and Medalion, the rationale to combine is the same as provided for claim 1 due to the overlapping subject matter of claims 1 and 8.
Drake-Medalion-Lesner doesn’t disclose
1 … training a large language model…
Cuomo, however, discloses
1 … training a large language model… (Col. 10:34-55, “The large language model privacy preservation system 150 pre-processes the statements and removes personally identifiable information (i.e., ‘John Doe’), removes punctuation and stop words, and applies stemming and lemmatization to generate ‘[user redacted] struggle depression What should’, which is then analyzed using topic modeling techniques.”)
Regarding the combination of Drake-Medalion-Lesner and Cuomo, 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 privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a large language model (LLM) feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the transcription system of Cuomo, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the LLM feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the LLM feature to the base privacy system of Drake-Medalion-Lesner, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
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 D'ARCY WINSTON STRAUB whose telephone number is (303)297-4405. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 9:00-5:00 Mountain Time. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, WILLIAM KORZUCH can be reached at (571)272-7589. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/D'Arcy Winston Straub/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2491
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