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 .
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination (RCE) under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission has been entered.
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 rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 101 are directed to an abstract idea without significantly more.
The claims do not provide significantly more than the judicial exception under the subject matter eligibility two-part statutory analysis, as provided below.
Regarding Step 1,
Step 1 addresses whether the claims are directed to one of the four statutory categories of invention, i.e., process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter according to MPEP §2106.03. Claims fall within one of the four statutory categories.
Regarding Step 2A [prong 1],
The claimed invention recites an abstract idea according to MPEP §2106.04. Independent claim 1, 18, 19 and 20 include the abstract features as underlined below which recite the following claim limitations, as an abstract idea.
integrate a plurality of data sources;
process the integrated data from using natural language processing;
performing speech-to-text processing on at least a subset of the integrated data;
the speech-to-text processing including generating a text version of an audio complaint and logically mapping the text version to customer complaint data using a customer identifier;
tokenizing at least a subset of the integrated data to replace one or more sensitive data elements with a non-sensitive equivalent; and extracting desired data from the integrated data by: exporting the integrated data to a staging area for transformation, wherein transformation includes filtering, cleaning, de-duplicating, validating, authenticating, performing calculations, or formatting the integrated data to match a schema;
score the processed data based on a plurality of score categories;
categorize the processed data into a plurality of categories based on the score and the plurality of score categories;
analyze the score and the categorized processed data.
The underlined claim limitations, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, fall under “Certain Methods of Organizing Human Activities” grouping of abstract ideas, and includes at least managing personal behavior or relationships or interactions between people (including social activities, teaching, and following rules or instructions). See MPEP §2106.04(a)(2)(II).
But for the recitation of generic implementation of computer system components, the claimed invention merely recites a process for managing personal behavior/relationships or interactions between people because the claimed steps recite managing customer complaints, including collecting, processing, scoring, categorizing, analyzing and reporting customer complaints. Accordingly, since the claimed invention describes a process that falls under “Certain Methods of Organizing Human Activities” grouping, the claimed invention recites an abstract idea.
Regarding Step 2A [prong 2],
The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application according to MPEP §2106.04(d). The claims include the following additional elements:
A system and computer-implemented method application, non-transitory computer-readable medium storing a set of instructions, one or more processors of a computing system, and computer-implemented method, comprising:
natural language processing;
the speech-to-text processing including generating a text version of an audio;
(NLP) speech-to-text processing on at least a subset of the integrated data; tokenizing at least a subset of the integrated data to replace one or more sensitive data elements with a non-sensitive equivalent; and extracting desired data from the integrated data by: exporting the integrated data to a staging area for transformation, wherein transformation includes filtering, cleaning, de-duplicating, validating, authenticating, performing calculations, or formatting the integrated data to match a schema of a first database; and moving the transformed data from the staging area to the first database;
In particular, the additional elements cited above beyond the abstract idea are recited at a high-level of generality and simply equivalent to a generic recitation and basic functionality that amount to no more than mere instructions to apply the judicial exception using generic computer technology components.
The claimed invention merely provides an abstract-idea-based-solution implemented with generic computer processes and components recited at a high-level of generality (aggregating, extracting, processing, scoring, categorizing and reporting data) using computer instructions to implement the abstract idea on a computer with computer code, and merely “apply it” without any meaningful technological limits or any improvement to technology, technical field or improvement to the functioning of the computer itself.
Additionally, the limitation of moving data to a database amounts to data gathering and selecting a particular data source or type of data to be manipulated, thus does not add any meaningful limitations, and since receiving, storing and transmitting data is considered one of the most basic functions of a computer, these additional elements are deemed as insignificant extra-solution activity to the judicial exception. The legal precedent in Electric Power Group and Ultramercial cited in MPEP 2106.05(g) indicate that selecting information, based on types of information and availability of information for collection, analysis and display, and requiring a request from a user to view an advertisement and restricting public access, are all insignificant extra-solution activity.
Therefore, the additional elements fail to integrate the recited abstract idea into any practical application since they do not impose any non-generic meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea. Thus, the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea.
Regarding Step 2B,
The claimed invention does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. See MPEP §2106.05.
As discussed above, the claimed additional elements recited above amounts to no more than mere instructions to implement the abstract idea by adding the words “apply it” using generic computer components and functionality. See MPEP §2106.05(h). Mere instructions to apply the judicial exception using generic computer components are insufficient to provide an inventive concept. Furthermore, the claimed additional elements merely limit the abstract idea to be executed in a computer environment, thus do nothing more than generally linking the use of a judicial exception to a particular technological environment or field of use. See MPEP §2106.05(h).
Additionally, re-evaluating the insignificant extra-solution activities listed above, it is determined that they are also well-understood, routine, and conventional, as well. See MPEP 2106.05(d). The legal precedent in Ultramercial, Versata, Symantec, TLI, and OIP Techs court decisions cited in MPEP 2106.05(d)(II) indicate that storing and retrieving information in memory, as well as receipt and transmission of information over a computer network, and updating an activity log are a well-understood, routine, and conventional functions claimed in a generic manner, as is the case here. See also Trading Techs. Int’l, Inc. v. IBG LLC, 921 F.3d 1084, 1093 (Fed. Cir. 2019) (data gathering and displaying are well-understood, routine, and conventional activities) and also buySAFE, Inc. v. Google, Inc., 765 F.3d 1350, 1355 (Fed. Cir. 2014) (“That a computer receives and sends the information over a network—with no further specification—is not even arguably inventive”).
Considered as an ordered combination, the additional elements are claimed at a high-level of generality and add nothing that is not already present when the steps are considered separately. The sequence of the claimed limitations is equally generic and otherwise held to be abstract since the combination of these additional elements is no more than mere instructions to apply the judicial exception using generic computer components operating in their ordinary and generic capacities of what is typically expected of computers storing, categorizing, analyzing, scoring and outputting data, and receiving and transmitting data between generic computer devices. The claimed invention is not patent eligible because the additional elements are merely invoked as tools to execute the abstract idea and thus are insufficient to amount to an inventive concept significantly more than the judicial exception.
As for the dependent claims, they merely further narrow and reiterate the same abstract ideas for integrating, processing, categorizing, and reporting/transmitting data using generic data storage and transmittal techniques with the same additional elements as recited above which provide nothing more than applying the abstract idea using generic computer technology components. Furthermore the dependent claims recite the following additional elements:
One or more databases;
user interface;
These additional elements do not provide any improvement to technology, technical field or improvement to the functioning of the computer itself, and at best simply applying the abstract idea executed in a general-purpose computer environment. Therefore the dependent claims are also directed to ineligible subject matter since they do not provide significantly more than the abstract idea itself.
Thus, after considering all claim elements both individually and as an ordered combination, it has been determined that the claimed invention as a whole, is not enough to transform the abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention since nothing in the claim limitations provide significantly more than the abstract idea under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
Response to Amendment and Arguments
Applicant’s argument and amendment has been considered however they are unpersuasive.
Regarding Applicant’s arguments for 101, the speech-to-text processing including generating a text version of an audio complaint and logically mapping the text version to customer complaint data using a customer identifier is generally linking the abstract idea to a particular technological environment or field of use. At best, the claimed invention merely recites a process for managing personal behavior/relationships or interactions between people because the claimed steps recite managing customer complaints, including collecting/extracting, processing, scoring, categorizing customer complaints. When coupled to a generic computer system performing functions that are within the regular repertoire of computer functions, that is not patent eligible.
Conclusion
The relevant prior art made of record not relied upon but considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure can be found in the current and/or previous PTO-892 Notice of References Cited.
US 20210390950 [0027] Using text-to-speech & Claims 8 and 11.
US20190095817 Distributed data processing for Machine Learning.
US20170235735 System and methods of generating structured data from unstructured data.
US20200250571 Automated data extraction and adaptation.
US20230222527 Omnichannel data processing and analysis.
Leong, Michael, et al. "Metroberta: Leveraging traditional customer relationship management data to develop a transit-topic-aware language model." Transportation Research Record 2678.9 (2024): 215-229.
T. Chumwatana and I. Chuaychoo, "Automatic filtering non-English complaint emails in tourism industry using N-gram extraction and classification techniques," 2016 4th International Symposium on Computational and Business Intelligence (ISCBI), Olten, Switzerland, 2016, pp. 216-220, doi: 10.1109/ISCBI.2016.7743287.
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C. İşcan, M. F. Özkara, A. E. Çelik and A. Akbulut, "Evaluating Turkish BERT-based Language Models for Effective Customer Feedback Interpretation in CRM," 2024 9th International Conference on Computer Science and Engineering (UBMK), Antalya, Turkiye, 2024, pp. 227-232, doi: 10.1109/UBMK63289.2024.10773436.
S. Senthurvelautham and S. Hettiarachchi, "SentScore: Autonomous Text Sentiment scoring and Summarizing System related to Complaint Management," 2018 4th International Conference for Convergence in Technology (I2CT), Mangalore, India, 2018, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/I2CT42659.2018.9058199.
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/LAURA YESILDAG/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3629
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