DETAILED ACTION
The Office Action is in response to claims filed
Claims 1-20 are pending.
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 .
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 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claims are directed to abstract subject matter without significantly more.
Claims 1, 7, and 15 as drafted is directed to a process, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, that covers steps which could be reasonably performed in the mind, with the aid of pen and paper but for the recitation of generic computer/computing components. The claim recites the limitation “determining an intent associated with the user input based on the one or more criteria; identifying one or more workflows from a set of pre-determined workflow patterns in response to the user input based on the intent;” which is a process that can be practically performed by the human mind through observation, evaluation, judgement, and/or opinion with the aid of pen and paper. Thus, the limitations fall under the “Mental Processes” group of abstract ideas.
The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. Claims 7 and 15 further recites the additional elements “one or more processors;” “memory”, and a “non-transitory storage medium” which is recited at a high level of generality such that it amounts to no more than a mere generic computer/computing component to apply the abstract idea (See MPEP 2106.05(f)). The claims recite the additional element “and generating a user interface that indicates the one or more workflows” which is a process, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, that does not require any particular application of the judicial exception and are, at best, the equivalent of adding the words “apply it” (See MPEP 2106.05(f)). The additional element omits any details as to how the generating a user interface solve the technical problem and instead recites only the idea of a solution or outcome. Accordingly, the additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits upon practicing the abstract idea.
The claim recites additional elements that do not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea. Claims 7 and 15 further recites the additional elements “one or more processors;” “memory”, and a “non-transitory storage medium” which is recited at a high level of generality such that it amounts to no more than a mere generic computer/computing component to apply the abstract idea (See MPEP 2106.05(f)). The claims recite the additional element “and generating a user interface that indicates the one or more workflows” which is a process, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, that does not require any particular application of the judicial exception and are, at best, the equivalent of adding the words “apply it” (See MPEP 2106.05(f)). The additional element omits any details as to how the generating a user interface solve the technical problem and instead recites only the idea of a solution or outcome. Accordingly, the additional elements recited in the claims cannot provide an inventive concept nor amount to significantly more. Thus, the claim is not patent eligible.
Claims 2, 9, and 16 as drafted is recited to a process, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, that covers steps which could be reasonably performed in the mind, with the aid of pen and paper, but for the recitation of generic computer/computing components. The claim recites the limitation “wherein the one or more workflows are identified … to: determine one or more pattern vectors in a pattern vector space based on the intent, wherein the pattern vector space comprises a plurality of pattern axes each corresponding to a respective pre-determined workflow pattern, and wherein the respective pre-determined workflow pattern comprises one or more defining points and corresponds to one or more respective predefined intents; and determine the one or more workflows for the user input based on the one or more pattern vectors and a respective criteria for the respective pre-determined workflow pattern, wherein the respective criteria is associated with the one or more defining points of the respective pre-determined workflow pattern.” which is a process that can be practically performed by the human mind through observation, evaluation, judgement, and/or opinion with the aid of pen and paper. Thus, the limitations fall under the “Mental Processes” group of abstract ideas.
The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The claims recite “by using one or more machine learning models that are trained” which is recited at a high level of generality such that it amounts to no more than a mere generic computer/computing component to apply the abstract idea (See MPEP 2106.05(f)). Accordingly, the additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits upon practicing the abstract idea.
The claims recite an additional element that does not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea. The claim recites the additional element “by using one or more machine learning models that are trained” which is recited at a high level of generality such that it amounts to no more than a mere generic computer/computing component to apply the abstract idea (See MPEP 2106.05(f)). Accordingly, the additional elements recited in the claims cannot provide an inventive concept nor amount to significantly more. Thus, the claim is not patent eligible.
Claims 3, 10, and 17 as drafted is directed to a process, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, that covers steps which could be reasonably performed in the mind, with the aid of pen and paper but for the recitation of generic computer/computing components. The claim recites the limitation “wherein the one of the one or more pattern vectors comprise at least two pre-determined workflow patterns.” which describes the data in the mental process. Thus, the limitations fall under the “Mental Processes” group of abstract ideas.
Claims 4, 11, and 18 as drafted is directed to a process, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, that covers steps which could be reasonably performed in the mind, with the aid of pen and paper but for the recitation of generic computer/computing components. The claim recites the limitation “modifying a respective portion of the workflow according to each of the one or more edit intents.” which is a process that can be practically performed by the human mind through observation, evaluation, judgement, and/or opinion with the aid of pen and paper. Thus, the limitations fall under the “Mental Processes” group of abstract ideas.
The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The claims further recite “receiving a natural-language request for editing a workflow of the one or more workflows; in response to the natural-language request, extracting one or more edit intents of the natural-language request;” which is directed to the insignificant extra solution activity of mere data transmission (See MPEP 2106.05(g)). Accordingly, the additional elements recited in the claims do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because it does not impose any meaningful limits upon practicing the abstract idea.
The claim recites insignificant extra solution activity that does not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea. The claim recites the process of “receiving a natural-language request for editing a workflow of the one or more workflows; in response to the natural-language request, extracting one or more edit intents of the natural-language request;” which has been determined to be a well-known, routine, and/or conventional activity of receiving or transmitting data over a network (See MPEP 2106.05(d)(II)). Accordingly, the additional elements cannot provide an inventive concept nor amount to significantly more. Thus, the claims are not patent eligible.
Claims 5, 12, and 19 as drafted is directed to a process, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, that covers steps which could be reasonably performed in the mind, with the aid of pen and paper but for the recitation of generic computer/computing components. The claim recites the limitation “indicating the modified respective portion of the workflow and corresponding edit intent of the one or more edit intents using a respective visual indicator.” describes the data in the mental process. Thus, the limitations fall under the “Mental Processes” group of abstract ideas.
Claims 6, 13, and 19 as drafted is directed to a process, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, that covers steps which could be reasonably performed in the mind, with the aid of pen and paper but for the recitation of generic computer/computing components. The claim recites the limitation “indicating the modified respective portion of the workflow and corresponding edit intent of the one or more edit intents using a respective visual indicator” which describes the data in the mental process . Thus, the limitations fall under the “Mental Processes” group of abstract ideas.
Claims 7 and 14 recites the additional elements “receiving, via the user interface, a selection for a workflow of the one or more workflows; and in response to receiving the selection, outputting the selected workflow.” which is directed to the insignificant extra solution activity of mere data transmission/data output (See MPEP 2106.05(g)). Accordingly, the additional elements recited in the claims do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because it does not impose any meaningful limits upon practicing the abstract idea.
The insignificant extra solution activity does not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea. The claims recite the additional elements “receiving, via the user interface, a selection for a workflow of the one or more workflows; and in response to receiving the selection, outputting the selected workflow receiving, via the user interface, a selection for a workflow of the one or more workflows; and in response to receiving the selection, outputting the selected workflow.” which has been determined to be a well-known, routine, and/or conventional activity of receiving or transmitting data over a network/data outpout (See MPEP 2106.05(d)(II)). Accordingly, the additional elements cannot provide an inventive concept nor amount to significantly more. Thus, the claims are not patent eligible.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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 factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claims 1, 7, 8, 14, and 15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over US 20200192975 A1 hereinafter “Maes” in view of US 20230115309 hereinafter “Kim”.
With regards to claim 1, Maes teaches
A method comprising: receiving a user input, wherein the user input is provided in a natural-language format and conveys one or more criteria for a custom workflow; (Maes [0026-29], “Moreover, the same principles discussed above may be applied here to produce an orchestration workflow that is associated with a specific orchestration language and addresses the problems or use cases that are represented by the input data. [conveys one or more criteria for a custom workflow] … The input data 110, in general, may take on numerous forms, depending on the particular implementation. As examples, the input data 110 may represent a cloud orchestration workflow associated with a different cloud orchestration language than the output cloud orchestration workflow 150, a script, or an expression of a user intent for the task(s) to be performed in the cloud computing environment and not associated with a particular workflow language [receiving a user input, wherein the user input is provided in a natural-language format].”)
determining an intent associated with the user input based on the one or more criteria; (Maes [0054], “Other implementations are contemplated, which are within the scope of the appended claims. For example, in accordance with further example implementations, natural language processing may be employed to translate workflows into corresponding intents or intent descriptions. In this manner, analogous to the techniques and systems that are described herein, in accordance with further example implementations, a natural language processing model may be trained and used to convert workflows into intent description”)
and generating a user interface that indicates the one or more workflows. (Maes [0037], “In accordance with example implementations, the input data 110 may be provided to the natural language processing engine 122 through one of many different input mechanisms, such as a data file or input entered via a graphical user interface (GUI) 123. Moreover, the natural language processing engine 122 may provide its output describing the output cloud orchestration workflow 150, candidate output cloud orchestration workflows 150, and so forth, as an output file, as a graphical output provided via the GUI 123, and so forth.”)
Maes does not explicitly teach: [identifying one or more workflows from a set of pre-determined workflow patterns] in response to the user input based on the intent;
However, in an analogous art Kim teaches identifying one or more workflows from a set of pre-determined workflow patterns […] (Kim [0077], “The AI system may be a rule-based system, or a neural network-based system (e.g., a feedforward neural network (FNN) or a recurrent neural network (RNN)). Alternatively, the AI system may be a combination thereof or other artificial intelligence systems. The plan may be selected from a set of predefined plans or may be generated in real time in response to a user request [in response to the user input based on the intent]. For example, the artificial intelligence system may select at least one plan from among the predefined plans [identifying one or more workflows from a set of pre-determined workflow patterns].”)
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have incorporated the teachings of Kim into the teachings of Maes. This combination of teachings would have resulted in a method configured to translate natural language descriptions into an intent based workflow interface, as in Maes, wherein a workflow is selected from a plurality of workflows in response to the intent, as in Kim. One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine these teachings for the purpose of using the semantic analysis to extract intent from a user input to generate a plan accordingly (Kim [0082-83]).
With regards to claim 7, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated.
Maes further teaches receiving, via the user interface, a selection for a workflow of the one or more workflows; and
in response to receiving the selection, outputting the selected workflow. (Maes [0040], “As a more specific example, referring to FIG. 1B in conjunction with FIG. 1A, in accordance with some implementations, the machine translation engine 120 may provide a graphical output 180 (output provided via the GUI 123, for example), which depicts a list of candidate output cloud orchestration workflows 150 (N candidate output cloud orchestration workflows 150-1, . . . , 150-N, being depicted in FIG. 1B, as examples) for selection by the user. In this manner, the user, through interaction with the GUI 123, such as by interaction through mouse clicks or movements, as examples, may select the particular candidate output cloud orchestration workflow 150. In accordance with example implementations, the user may open the selected candidate cloud orchestration workflow 150 in an editing interface, or editor 126 (see FIG. 1A), for purposes of further refining, or editing, the workflow 150 to produce a final cloud orchestration workflow. In accordance with example implementations, the GUI 123 and the editor 126 may be provided through the execution of machine executable instructions by one or multiple processors 124 of the physical machine 120.”)
Claims 8 and 14 are directed to a system corresponding to the method disclosed in claims 1 and 7 respectively. Thus, claims 8 and 14 are rejected for the same reasons set forth in claims 1 and 7.
Claim 15 is directed to a tangible non-transitory computer readable storage media corresponding to the method limitations as disclosed in claim 1. Thus, claim 15 is rejected for the same reasons set forth in claim 1.
Claims 2-3, 9-10, and 16-17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Maes in view of Kim as applied to claims 1, 8, and 15 above, in view of US 20240338528 A1 hereinafter “Wolfe” and further in view of US 11973725 B2 hereinafter “Le”.
With regards to claim 2, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated.
The combination of Maes and Kim does not teach: wherein the one or more workflows are identified by using one or more machine learning models that are trained to: determine one or more pattern vectors in a pattern vector space based on the intent, and wherein the respective pre-determined workflow pattern comprises one or more defining points and corresponds to one or more respective predefined intents; and
determine the one or more workflows for the user input based on the one or more pattern vectors and a respective criteria for the respective pre-determined workflow pattern, wherein the respective criteria is associated with the one or more defining points of the respective pre-determined workflow pattern
However, in an analogous art Wolfe teaches wherein the one or more workflows are identified by using one or more machine learning models that are trained to: determine one or more pattern vectors in a pattern vector space based on the intent, (Wolfe [0038], “In one scenario, with respect to a simple example of training feedforward neural network, natural language inputs may be converted into a numerical format that can be used as input to the neural network, such as converting words in the inputs into numerical word embeddings or other feature vectors (e.g., using a bag-of-words representation or other techniques). The neural network may include an input layer to represent the feature vectors, several hidden layers to learn the relationships between the inputs and the intents, and an output layer with one node for each intent.”) and wherein the respective pre-determined workflow pattern comprises one or more defining points and corresponds to one or more respective predefined intents; (Wolfe [0018], “As an example, the content may be generated or selected for the content presentation based on nodes of the action tree that corresponding to available actions [wherein the respective pre-determined workflow pattern comprises one or more defining points], nodes of the action tree that correspond to questions directed to the labeler user, edges/branches of the action tree that correspond to available decisions, or other features of the action tree. As another example, content for a workflow may be generated based on the action tree, where an order of the presentation of questions (and whether the questions are presented) is in accordance with the decision pathways of the action tree and the answers of the labeler user to the presented questions of the workflow [corresponds to one or more respective predefined intents]. As a further example, non-leaf nodes of the action tree may correspond to questions directed to a labeler, and leaf nodes of the action tree may correspond to selectable actions of the action set.”) and
determine the one or more workflows for the user input based on the one or more pattern vectors and a respective criteria for the respective pre-determined workflow pattern, (Wolfe [0069-70], “The method of any of the preceding embodiments, further comprising: determining an intent in a feature vector space, the intent corresponding to the ordered intent label, wherein generating the labeled dataset comprises associating the natural language input with the intent from the feature vector space. The method of any of the preceding embodiments, wherein the candidate actions of the action set correspond to leaf nodes of an action tree, wherein the action tree comprises non-leaf nodes corresponding to questions directed to a labeler, the method further comprising: in response to presenting a first natural language input to a plurality of labelers, obtaining first user selections indicating a first action of the action tree as an action related to the first natural language input and second user selections indicating a second action of the action tree as an action related to the first natural language input;”) wherein the respective criteria is associated with the one or more defining points of the respective pre-determined workflow pattern (Wolfe [0019], “In one use case, with respect to FIG. 2A, action tree 200 may include nodes 202 and branches 204, where each node 202 corresponds to a portion of the content presentation (e.g., a different portion of a workflow for the content presentation), and each branch 204 corresponds to a transition to a different next portion of the content presentation (e.g., a different uniform resource locator (URL) or other link to a different next portion of the workflow). In some use cases, each node 202 may correspond to a question and context information related to the question (e.g., a guide for answering “Yes” to the question or answering No to the question). In a further use case, one or more of the nodes 204 may additionally or alternatively correspond to one or more candidate actions that are selectable by the labeler user (e.g., to indicate that a candidate action should be part of an intent label for a natural language input). The candidate actions for such nodes 204 may, for example, be a small subset of the available actions in the action set (e.g., a single action to be confirmed or otherwise selected by the user for an intent label, two to six actions from which the user may selected from for the intent label, etc.).”) [Examiner’s Note: The workflow is the series of actions that is based off of the intent of the first natural language input that defines the criteria through an answer of the questions]
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have incorporated the teachings of Wolfe into the teachings of Maes in view of Kim. This combination of teachings would have resulted in a method configured to translate natural language descriptions into an intent based workflow interface, as in Maes, wherein a workflow is selected from a plurality of workflows in response to the intent, as in Kim, the selection is a result of an association between one or more workflows and a vector that further corresponds to user intent, as in Wolfe. One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine these teachings for the purpose of generating an action tree to develop a workflow that matches the intent label for a natural language input (Wolfe [0051]).
The combination of Maes, Kim and Wolfe does not teach:
wherein the pattern vector space comprises a plurality of pattern axes each corresponding to a respective pre-determined workflow pattern,
However, in an analogous art Le teaches wherein the pattern vector space comprises a plurality of pattern axes each corresponding to a respective pre-determined workflow pattern, (Le Column 6 Lines 23-42, “For example, the first machine learning model may quantitatively express each specific intent as a plurality of values (e.g., a vector array). The system may then determine the distance (e.g., the similarities) between two specific intents based on a correlation distance… Specific intent with independence may be put into different intent clusters, whereas specific intents without independence may be put into the same intent cluster.”) [Examiner’s Note: A cluster defines a group of actions that share a common classification to a user intention]
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have incorporated the teachings of Le into the teachings of Maes in view of Kim and further in view of Wolfe. This combination of teachings would have resulted in a method configured to translate natural language descriptions into an intent based workflow interface, as in Maes, wherein a workflow is selected from a plurality of workflows in response to the intent, as in Kim, the selection is a result of an association between one or more workflows and a vector that further corresponds to user intent, as in Wolfe, One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine these teachings for the purpose of using feature map dimensions for dynamic responses that first aggregates information about the user to determine their intent (Le Column 11 Lines 1-30).
With regards to claim 3, the rejection of claim 2 is incorporated.
The combination of Maes, Kim and Wolfe does not teach: wherein the one of the one or more pattern vectors comprise at least two pre-determined workflow patterns.
However, in an analogous art Le teaches wherein the one of the one or more pattern vectors comprise at least two pre-determined workflow patterns. (Le Column 6 Lines 23-59, “Specific intent with independence may be put into different intent clusters, whereas specific intents without independence may be put into the same intent cluster … System 100 may then apply business rules or other factors (e.g., device screen size), to refine the plurality of intent clusters. For example, based on the size of the device, the system may generate intent clusters having a predetermined number (or maximum or minimum number) of specific intents.”)
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have incorporated the teachings of Le into the teachings of Maes in view of Kim and further in view of Wolfe. This combination of teachings would have resulted in a method configured to translate natural language descriptions into an intent based workflow interface, as in Maes, wherein a workflow is selected from a plurality of workflows in response to the intent, as in Kim, the selection is a result of an association between one or more workflows and a vector that further corresponds to user intent, as in Wolfe, One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine these teachings for the purpose of using feature map dimensions for dynamic responses that first aggregates information about the user to determine their intent (Le Column 11 Lines 1-30).
Claims 9 and 10 are directed to a system corresponding to the method disclosed in claims 2 and 3 respectively. Thus, claims 9 and 10 are rejected for the same reasons set forth in claims 2 and 3.
Claims 16 and 17 are directed to a tangible non-transitory computer readable storage media corresponding to the method limitations as disclosed in claims 2 and 3. Thus, claims 16 and 17 are rejected for the same reasons set forth in claims 2 and 3.
Claims 4-5, 11-12, and 18-19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Maes in view of Kim as applied to claims 1, 8, and 15 respectively above, and further in view of US 12299441 B2 hereinafter “Panikkar”.
With regards to claim 4, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated.
Maes further teaches receiving a natural-language request (Maes [0055], “To summarize the above-described translation-based generation of an automation workflow, referring to FIG. 4, in accordance with example implementations, a technique 400 includes receiving (block 404), by a computer, data representing a task to be automated in association with a computing environment. Pursuant to block 408, the technique 400 includes applying, by the computer, natural language processing to the data to generate a sequence of statements describing operations to be executed to perform the task.”) for editing a workflow of the one or more workflows; (Maes [0042], “. In this manner, by analyzing metrics associated with the generated cloud orchestration workflows 150, edits made to the workflows 150 and selected candidate workflow options, in accordance with some implementations, the machine learning engine 122 may adapt to produce future cloud orchestration workflows 150 having less complexities, improved execution times, as well as other optimized criteria. Moreover, in accordance with example implementations, the training of the machine language model 125 may result in the machine learning engine 122 learning how to combine existing workflows, e.g., whether to sequentially combine workflows, how to select workflows for combination, how to combine workflows in parallel, how to call other workflows, how to escape from workflows, and so forth. Moreover, the training of the machine language model 125 may allow the natural language processing engine 122 to adapt to optimally merge or close into a new workflow (e.g., such as insertion of one or multiple workflow parts within another workflow, and so forth).”)
in response to the natural-language request, extracting one or more edit intents of the natural-language request; (Maes [0060], “in accordance with example implementations, the natural language processing engine 122 may receive data (block 704), which represents a particular automation workflow and apply (block 708) natural language processing to the data to generate a corresponding determined intent. The determined intent, in turn, allows the input automation workflow to be “understood” and described in terms of what the workflow may do.”)
The combination of Maes and Kim does not teach: modifying a respective portion of the workflow according to each of the one or more edit intents.
However, in an analogous art Panikkar teaches modifying a respective portion of the workflow according to each of the one or more edit intents. (Panikkar Columns 5-6 Lines 64-67 and 1-10, “The automated actions can include, for example, providing information (e.g., to one or more of the user devices 102) related to the interlocking applications. The information, in some embodiments, can include descriptions explaining the relationships between the interlocking applications and/or information identifying one or more developers or developer groups associated with each of the interlocking applications. The automated actions can alternatively or additionally include automatically creating and/or assigning a ticket in an issue tracking system to one or more users associated with the impacted applications. For example, the ticket can flag one or more software tests or portions of software code that may need to be updated and/or tested.”)
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have incorporated the teachings of Panikkar into the teachings of Maes in view of Kim. This combination of teachings would have resulted in a method configured to translate natural language descriptions into an intent based workflow interface, as in Maes, wherein a workflow is selected from a plurality of workflows in response to the intent, as in Kim, and modifying a respective section of the selected workflow in response to the user’s intent, as in Panikkar. One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine these teachings for the purpose of developing a high level description to define new software related to planning, scheduling, allocating resources, developing, testing, and maintaining the software broken down by feature requests (Panikkar Column Lines 32-49).
With regards to claim 5, the rejection of claim 4 is incorporated.
The combination of Maes and Kim does not teach: indicating the modified respective portion of the workflow and corresponding edit intent of the one or more edit intents using a respective visual indicator.
However, in an analogous art Panikkar teaches indicating the modified respective portion of the workflow and corresponding edit intent of the one or more edit intents using a respective visual indicator. (Panikkar Column 9 Lines 27-58, “The software summary capturing tool 202, in at least some embodiments, can enable a user to input a given software summary. The user can then select an option (e.g., a button in a user interface) to show possible interlocking applications corresponding to the software summary. In at least one embodiment, contact information can be added to the application knowledge base, which would enable the software summary capturing tool 202 to automatically provide contact information related to the interlocking applications, so that the user can quickly gather additional information, if needed … The feedback may alternatively or additionally include updates and/or changes to at least some of the information in the knowledge bases (e.g., keyword application knowledge base 300 and/or intent interlock knowledge base 400). For example, if an application is identified as a test-only interlocking application, and a user provides feedback indicating that the application is an active interlocking application, then this can trigger the intent resolution module 212 to update the identified interlocking applications 206 to reflect any changes.”)
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have incorporated the teachings of Panikkar into the teachings of Maes in view of Kim. This combination of teachings would have resulted in a method configured to translate natural language descriptions into an intent based workflow interface, as in Maes, wherein a workflow is selected from a plurality of workflows in response to the intent, as in Kim, and modifying a respective section of the selected workflow in response to the user’s intent, as in Panikkar. One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine these teachings for the purpose of developing a high-level description to define new software related to planning, scheduling, allocating resources, developing, testing, and maintaining the software broken down by feature requests (Panikkar Column Lines 32-49).
Claims 11-12 are directed to a system corresponding to the method disclosed in claims 4-5 respectively. Thus, claims 11-12 are rejected for the same reasons set forth in claims 4-5.
Claims 18-19 are directed to a tangible non-transitory computer readable storage media corresponding to the method limitations as disclosed in claims 4-5 respectively. Thus, claims 18-19 are rejected for the same reasons set forth in claims 4-5.
Claims 6, 13, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Maes in view of Kim in view of Panikkar as applied to claims 6, 12, and 19 above, and further in view of US 20250086895 A1 hereinafter “Chan”.
With regards to claim 6, the rejection of claim 5 is incorporated.
The combination of Maes, Kim, and Panikkar does not teach: wherein the respective visual indicator comprises highlighting the modified respective portion and the corresponding edit intent.
However, in an analogous art Chan teaches wherein the respective visual indicator comprises highlighting the modified respective portion and the corresponding edit intent. (Chan [0025] “That is, in some cases, a user profile may select, highlight, copy, etc. content within a virtual space and include such content in the request. For example, a canvas may include a section that includes content designed to describe the purpose of the virtual space (or channel) with which the canvas is associated. In such cases, a user profile may determine that a portion of the content is complex and/or difficult to understand. As such, the user profile may send a request to the communication platform to modify the portion of the content. The user profile may highlight the portion of the content and select a modifying operation the user profile would like to apply to the highlighted portion. In this case, the user profile may select the modifying operation of simplifying the text. Accordingly, the request, as received by the communication platform, may include the highlighted content and/or the modifying operation.”)
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have incorporated the teachings of Chan into the teachings of Maes in view of Kim in view of Panikkar. This combination of teachings would have resulted in a method configured to translate natural language descriptions into an intent based workflow interface, as in Maes, wherein a workflow is selected from a plurality of workflows in response to the intent, as in Kim, and modifying a respective section of the selected workflow in response to the user’s intent, as in Panikkar, and highlighting the respective edit portion corresponding to the user intent, as in Chan. One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine these teachings for the purpose of improving user experience through organizing data in a manner that is easy to consume, process, or distribute upon modifying content for output in response to a user request (Chan [0017]).
Claim 13 is directed to a system corresponding to the method disclosed in claim 6 respectively. Thus, claim 13 is rejected for the same reasons set forth in claim 6.
Claim 20 is directed to a tangible non-transitory computer readable storage media corresponding to the method limitations as disclosed in claim 6 respectively. Thus, claim 20 is rejected for the same reasons set forth in claim 6.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to TRAVIS VIET TRAN whose telephone number is (571)272-3720. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 8:30AM-5PM.
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/T.V.T./ Examiner, Art Unit 2191
/WEI Y MUI/ Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2191