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 .
Status of the Application
Claims 1-20 are pending and have been examined in this application. This communication is the first action on the merits. As of the date of this communication, no Information Disclosure Statements (IDS) have been filed on behalf of this case.
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 claimed invention is directed to a judicial exception (i.e., a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea) without significantly more.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. Specifically, claims 1-20 are directed toward at least abstract idea without significantly more. In accordance with MPEP § 2106, the rationale for this determination is explained below.
Representative claim 1 is directed towards a method, claim 8 is directed towards a non-transitory computer-readable media, claim 15 is directed towards an apparatus, which are statutory categories of invention.
Although, claim 1 is directed toward a statutory category of invention, the claim however, is directed toward a judicial exception namely an abstract idea. The limitations that set forth the abstract idea recites: receiving instructions to publish social media posts on a plurality of social media platforms, the social media posts indicative of a business niche and a target audience;
for each social media platform in the plurality, generating, a first rule for content in the social media posts and a second rule for a publishing schedule, the first rule and the second rule based at least on: (1) rules of the respective social media platform, and (2) post insights of previously published social media posts on the respective social media platform; for each social media platform in the plurality, automatically generating, a social media post according to the first rule and a publishing schedule for the generated social media post according to the second rule; publishing the social media post on the respective social media platform according to the respective publishing schedule; monitoring post insights on the published social media post; and providing the post insights for learning. These limitations, set forth commercial interactions including, marketing or sales activities and business relations, as well as managing personal behavior or interactions between people including social activities and following rules or instructions. As such, the limitations are directed towards the abstract grouping of Certain Methods of Organizing Human Activity in prong one of step 2A of the Alice/Mayo test (see MPEP 2106.04(a)(2) II).
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because, when analyzed as a whole under prong two of step 2A of the Alice/Mayo test (see MPEP 2106.04(d)), the additional elements provided by the claim amount to merely using a computer as a tool to apply an abstract idea. In particular the claim recites the additional elements: using an artificial intelligence (AI) engine; using the AI engine; to the AI engine, which are recited at a high level of generality and are the mere use of a computer as a tool to perform the abstract ideas. See MPEP 2106.05(f). Simply applying the abstract idea by a computer is not a practical application of the abstract idea. The additional elements do not involve improvements to the functioning of a computer, or to any other technology or technical field (MPEP 2106.05(a)), the claim does not apply the abstract idea with, or by use of, a particular machine (MPEP 2106.05(b)), the claim does not effect a transformation or reduction of a particular article to a different state or thing (MPEP 2106.05(c)), and the claim does not apply or use the abstract idea in some other meaningful way beyond generally linking the use of the abstract idea to a particular technological environment, such that the claim as a whole is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the exception (MPEP 2106.05(e)). Therefore, the claim does not, for example, purport to improve the functioning of a computer. Nor does it effect an improvement in any other technology or technical field. Accordingly, the additional elements do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea, and the claim is directed to abstract ideas.
The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. As discussed above with respect to integration of the abstract idea into a practical application, the claim recites the additional limitations of an artificial intelligence (AI) engine, a processor, (claim 8), a processing circuitry, a memory (claim 15), which do not constitute significantly more because they are simply an attempt to limit the abstract idea to a particular technological environment1. Viewing these limitations as a combination, the additional elements amount to no more than merely applying the exception using generic computer components, executing basic functions of a computer. Merely applying an exception using generic computer components cannot provide an inventive concept. Therefore, the limitations of the claim as a whole, when viewed individually and as an ordered combination, do not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea.
A review of dependent claims 2-7, likewise, do not recite any limitations that would remedy the deficiencies outlined above. The claims only further add to the abstract idea, with no elements which integrate the abstract idea into a practical application or constitute significantly more. Thus, while they may slightly narrow the abstract idea by further describing it, they do not make it less abstract and are rejected accordingly. Further still, claims 8-20 suffer from substantially the same deficiencies as outlined with respect to claims 1-7 and are also rejected accordingly.
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 set forth 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.
Claims 1, 5-8, 12-15 and 19-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Khoury (US Publication 2021/0224858).
Regarding Claims 1, 8 and 15, Khoury teaches method, non-transitory computer-readable media and apparatus, comprising:
a processing circuit; Khoury [0449];
a memory storing data; Khoury [0045];
and a communication circuitry, wherein the processing circuitry executes instructions associated with the data, the processing circuitry is coupled to the communication circuitry and the memory, and the processing circuitry and the memory cooperate; Khoury [0086];
receiving instructions to publish social media posts on a plurality of social media platforms, the social media posts indicative of a business niche and a target audience; Khoury [0089: computing systems, as described herein, can be connected and can exchange data and/or commands or other instructions or the like, via one or more connections, including but not limited to a connection over a network; 0036: generating and distributing advertisements, such as social ads, real-time, and on the fly, in a manner to reflect both national corporate as well as localized business interests; the social advertisement platforms disclosed provide the ability for a single, or multiple users, e.g., from a common interface, to promote a business through one or more social networks;0024: provide for the manual and/or semi- and/or autonomous generation and distribution of highly individualized communications and advertisements to specifically targeted recipients so as to reach local consumers with advertisements that are catered to them individually; 0403: system may be configured for determining and/or selecting the best content to use to form and generate the communications with respect to various defined target audience characteristics, which communications may be geared towards achieving a pre-defined, desired result, such as the increase in consumer sentiment and/or an increase in product or service sales, such as within a determined body of recipients];
for each social media platform in the plurality, generating, using an artificial intelligence (AI) engine, a first rule for content in the social media posts and a second rule for a publishing schedule, the first rule and the second rule based at least on: (1) rules of the respective social media platform, and (2) post insights of previously published social media posts on the respective social media platform; Khoury [0234: process can be repeated a number of times, and be subjected to a machine learning protocol, which when trained, can be used to autonomously generate and distribute automated communications; 0211: automated portion of the platform may access an artificial intelligence module that is configured for scoring, recommending, and/or generating communication content over a number of different issues related to the selling of the goods and/or services of a business organization, such as based on corporate and/or local standards and rules; 0228: content to be recommended may be paired with recommendations for the audience to be targeted, the platform for distributing the communications, and the peak time for posting the content; 0321: system may be adapted for determining, exactly when the peak time is for a local brand's customers to be maximally engaging with that brand's social media modalities, and thereby determines a schedule for when various crafted communications should be posted, on which social media modality, and to which audiences; 0232: system can be configured to evaluate proposed content to be used in generating new communications, to predict the performance of new communications, and can determine whether the proposed content is likely to be well received or not by an identified recipient, such as based on an analysis of previous performance; 0339: for instance, a geolocation conflict check may be performed whereby conditions related to the proximity within which content was last used can be evaluated; time check may also be performed whereby conditions related to the duration of time that has passed since the content was last used may be evaluated; the last time a specific location used the content in messaging a specific audience may also be evaluated; if any one of these conflicts checks fails, new, non-conflicting content, scheduling, and audience can be proposed by the system];
for each social media platform in the plurality, automatically generating, using the AI engine, a social media post according to the first rule and a publishing schedule for the generated social media post according to the second rule; Khoury [0206: messages and/or other content to be generated can be personalized to the recipient based on one or more of their location, their online presence and/or activity, communications they have sent or responded to, and/or one or more advertisement campaign particulars currently being administered by the system; 0307: workflow manager may not only determine what content is to be generated and used with respect to particular social media or other Internet platforms, but can particularize the communication content and the scheduling of the distribution of the content so as to optimize one or more determined goals; Khoury [0321: system configured to determine exactly when the peak time is for a local brand's customers to be maximally engaging with that brand's social media modalities, such as FACEBOOK®, TWITTER®, and the like, and thereby determines a schedule for when various crafted communications should be posted, on which social media modality];
publishing the social media post on the respective social media platform according to the respective publishing schedule; Khoury [0195: content new or previously used, may be evaluated along with one or more audiences, and based on those predictions the system can suggest not only what to post, but who to post it to, what to post it on, e.g., which social media platform, how to post it, such as within which context, as well as when to post it, e.g. based on the peak times for that poster, to those audience members, and upon that determined platform];
monitoring post insights on the published social media post; Khoury [0071: collect, evaluate, score, and generate online web content and communications, for example, advertising, personal or business webpages, blogs, social media posts, etc., as well as evaluating and/or scoring those who engage with such communications; 0234: content can then be tagged, tracked, and recipient response can be collected];
and providing the post insights to the AI engine for learning. Khoury [0234: recipient response can be collected and used to evaluate the actual response in view of the predicted response and thus be further used to train the machine learning module].
Regarding Claims 5, 12 and 19, Khoury discloses, wherein the post insights for each social media platform includes customer engagement rates and business needs for various days. Khoury [0260: system may be configured for tracking content, as it is generated, posted online, interacted with, collected, modified, and reused, and may further be configured for identifying and tracking those who engage with that content; 0418: a first correlation may determine the nature of engagement with a company's and their messaging, e.g., in the past. This may be reviewed for a period of past engagements or non-engagements, and may be determined over a series of days].
Regarding Claims 6 and 13, Khoury discloses, wherein the schedule includes a specific date and time when at least one of the social media posts is to be reposted on the respective social media platform. Khoury [0321: system may be configured to determine exactly when the peak time is for a local brand's customers to be maximally engaging with that brand's social media modalities, such as FACEBOOK®, TWITTER®, and the like, and thereby determines a schedule for when various crafted communications should be posted, on which social media modality, and to which audiences so as to get the maximum number of engagements with the posted communications].
Regarding Claims 7, 14 and 20, Khoury discloses, sending the social media posts to a frontend for feedback by a human before publishing on the social media platform;
Khoury [0220: consumer may be asked if the returned response answers their question, and/or to rate the response, this rating may then be fed back to the AI module so as to better train the machine learning; 0230: communications can be transmitted to end users, and feedback can be retrieved to determine how well the communications worked to achieve a predicted result];
and responsive to the feedback, making a determination of at least one of: terminating publishing the social media posts on the respective social media platforms, continuing publishing the social media posts on the social respective media platforms, and modifying at least one social media post before publishing on the respective social media platform. Khoury [0317: the system or moderator may give feedback as to what would be necessary in order to put the communication in a condition for distribution; 0236: system may schedule one or more tasks to be performed based on the received feedback data, such as whether to use or not use the generated content again, or to modify the content].
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 of this title, 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.
Claim 2-4, 9-11 and 16-18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Khoury (US Publication 2021/0224858) in view of Parasnis (WO Publication 2024/167651).
A. In regards to Claims 2, 9 and 16, Khoury discloses, wherein automatically generating the social media post for the respective social media platform comprises:
generating a first prompt instructing the AI engine to return a plurality of second prompts, Khoury [0296: chat bot that configured for rapidly receiving inputs and inquiries, targeting content for response generation, as well as dynamically generating natural language messaging and responses that are individually catered to recipient characteristics while at the same time being capable of being mass deployed, across several internet based social platforms, in a prompt manner];
and the first prompt specifies that a content of the social media post be indicative of the business niche and the target audience, Khoury [0130: system may present prompt directed to the name of an organization for which the advertisement is to be generated, and the system may then prompt the further entry of locations, people, and/or services to be provided]
selecting one of the non-textual content returned by the AI engine; Khoury [130: the prompts may present one or more images, such as presented at the graphical user interface, for selection by a user, e.g., a communication generator, of the system; 0040: processing engine is configured for collecting a plurality of media components, such as a plurality of media components that include one or more of a text element, an image element, an animation element, a carousel element, a video element, and the like];
and combining the selected textual content and the selected non-textual content into the social media post according to the generated rule for the respective social media platform; Khoury [0175: system may be configured such that one or more advertisements or advertisement components, such as a template, text, image, or other media rich creative asset that may be collected and/or otherwise entered into the system, and may be published or posted, such as via transmission through a user accessing a suitably configured user account];
Khoury does not specifically disclose, wherein: each of the second prompts to be a variation of a request to the AI engine to create a social media post, this is disclosed by Parasnis [0074: an AI interactive tool may also be used to assist the user in creating inputs to generate the prompts; [0075] the results are saved, and are presented, such as by posting on social media];
Khoury does not specifically disclose, selecting one of the second prompts returned by the AI engine; this is disclosed by Parasnis [0050: after an input is entered in the prompt tool, the content- generation tool generates results in the variations panel with one or more options that can be selected by the user; the results are referred to as variations or outputs];
generating a third prompt instructing the AI engine to return a plurality of fourth prompts, each of the fourth prompts to be a variation of a request to the AI engine to create a social media post on the respective social media platform using the selected second prompt; this is disclosed by Parasnis [0162: the user selects a desired option, additional prompting questions may be presented to further define the content; 0063: each canvas includes a collection of one or more prompts, the text input used to generate content; the canvas can have an associated type (e.g., related to the template used to generate the canvas), such as an Instagram post, a Facebook post, a Twitter post, a blog post, a Google ad, etc];
selecting textual content in one of the social media posts returned by the AI engine; this is disclosed by Parasnis; [0152: after the content-generation tool generates content and the content is added to the results or the canvas, the user may regenerate new content based on the previously generated content; 0153: for example, the user may select some text in the canvas and invoke new options; 0187: for example, the user has selected the asset option, so assets from the project or the global catalogs are presented to the user in the prompt panel; 0188: in this example, the user has been working in the canvas with Coke cans, so the prompt panel presents the selectable assets to be added to the description; the selected asset will be included in the results];
generating a fifth prompt to the AI engine to return a plurality of non-textual content relevant to the selected textual content; this is disclosed by Parasnis [0086: at a high level, selecting the start-training option means telling the content-generation tool to learn about this particular product, so when an input in the prompt includes the “Superstar Shoes,” the content generation tool will generate images with the Superstar Shoes];
It would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the invention for one of ordinary skill in the art to have modified the teachings of Khoury with the teachings from Parasnis with the motivation to provide a template catalog including a collection of templates. that defines the structure of prompts, prornpt rules, and other additional context used to generate a canvas; where the template is a skeleton structure that can be used to create the canvas for a particular type of content associated with the template (e.g., a Facebook ad). Parasnis [0061].
B. In regards to Claims 3, 10 and 17, Khoury discloses, wherein the first prompt further specifies that the content of the social media post be indicative of a geographic location of the target audience. Khoury [0310: one or more additional features, such as for configuring the communication and its delivery may also be selected. These features may include audience characteristics, e.g., creating an audience to be targeted, such as the number of recipients, the characteristics and/or demographics of the recipients, as well as the geographical region within which the recipients are located].
C. In regards to Claims 4, 11 and 18, Khoury discloses, wherein the AI engine comprises a natural language processing (NLP) module and an image processing module, Khoury [0266: processing may be performed by one or more natural language or image processing operations]
the NLP module generates the textual content, Khoury [0266: once identified as being of interest, the content of interest, e.g., texts, can be collected and can be converted from one form into another; such processing may be performed by one or more natural language processing operations]
and the image processing module generates the non-textual content. Khoury [0266: once identified as being of interest, the content of interest, e.g., image, graphic, video content, can be collected and can be converted from one form into another; such processing may be performed by one or more image processing operations]
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Errol CARVALHO whose telephone number is (571)272-9987. The Examiner can normally be reached on M-F 9:30-7:00 Alt Fri
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Ilana Spar can be reached on 571- 270-7537. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/E CARVALHO/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3622
1 See, Alice Corp. Pty Ltd. v. CLS Bank lnt'l, 134 S. Ct. 2347, 2360 (2014) (noting that none of the hardware recited “offers a meaningful limitation beyond generally linking ‘the use of the [method] to a particular technological environment,’ that is, implementation via computers” (citing Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U.S. 593, 610-11 (2010))).