DETAILED ACTION
Introduction
1. This office action is in response to Applicant’s submission filed on 04/29/2024. Claims 1-21 are pending in the application. As such, claims 1-21 have been examined.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
2. The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Double Patenting
3. The nonstatutory double patenting rejection is based on a judicially created doctrine grounded in public policy (a policy reflected in the statute) so as to prevent the unjustified or improper timewise extension of the “right to exclude” granted by a patent and to prevent possible harassment by multiple assignees. A nonstatutory double patenting rejection is appropriate where the conflicting claims are not identical, but at least one examined application claim is not patentably distinct from the reference claim(s) because the examined application claim is either anticipated by, or would have been obvious over, the reference claim(s). See, e.g., In re Berg, 140 F.3d 1428, 46 USPQ2d 1226 (Fed. Cir. 1998); In re Goodman, 11 F.3d 1046, 29 USPQ2d 2010 (Fed. Cir. 1993); In re Longi, 759 F.2d 887, 225 USPQ 645 (Fed. Cir. 1985); In re Van Ornum, 686 F.2d 937, 214 USPQ 761 (CCPA 1982); In re Vogel, 422 F.2d 438, 164 USPQ 619 (CCPA 1970); In re Thorington, 418 F.2d 528, 163 USPQ 644 (CCPA 1969).
A timely filed terminal disclaimer in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(c) or 1.321(d) may be used to overcome an actual or provisional rejection based on nonstatutory double patenting provided the reference application or patent either is shown to be commonly owned with the examined application, or claims an invention made as a result of activities undertaken within the scope of a joint research agreement. See MPEP § 717.02 for applications subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA as explained in MPEP § 2159. See MPEP § 2146 et seq. for applications not subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA . A terminal disclaimer must be signed in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(b).
The filing of a terminal disclaimer by itself is not a complete reply to a nonstatutory double patenting (NSDP) rejection. A complete reply requires that the terminal disclaimer be accompanied by a reply requesting reconsideration of the prior Office action. Even where the NSDP rejection is provisional the reply must be complete. See MPEP § 804, subsection I.B.1. For a reply to a non-final Office action, see 37 CFR 1.111(a). For a reply to final Office action, see 37 CFR 1.113(c). A request for reconsideration while not provided for in 37 CFR 1.113(c) may be filed after final for consideration. See MPEP §§ 706.07(e) and 714.13.
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Claims 1-21 are rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claims 1-29 of copending Application No. 18/649,946. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because the claims of copending App. ‘946 anticipate the instant claims as presented in the chart below. Independent claims 1, 8, and 15 in the current App. ‘962 are anticipated by independent claims 1, 18, and 24 in copending App. ‘946. Dependent claims 2-7; 9-14; and 16-21 follow likewise the similar mapping to the corresponding dependent claims 2-17; 19-23; and 25-28 in the copending App. ‘946.
Current App. 19/005,962:
1. A method, comprising: operating a software application that utilizes an interface to receive commands from a user; receiving a command during execution of the software application; identifying an error for running of the command; raising a question to the user to resolve the error instead of crashing execution of the software application; identifying an answer to the question to address the error; applying the answer; and retrying a step of the command corresponding to the error, wherein the step of the command is retried using the answer that was applied.
Copending App. 18/649,946:
1. (Currently Amended) A method, comprising: operating a software application that utilizes an interface to receive commands from a user; receiving a command during [[the]] execution of the software application for functionality that is not programmed into the software application; fetching logic corresponding to the functionality; and implementing the logic by the software application for the software application to learn the functionality, wherein natural language is used through the interface to implement the logic.
This is a provisional nonstatutory double patenting rejection because the patentably indistinct claims have not in fact been patented.
Allowable Subject Matter
4. Claims 1-21 would be allowable over the prior art of record.
5. The following is an Examiner’s Statement of Reasons for Allowance:
Claims 1-21 are found to be allowable over the prior art teachings for at least the same reasons as presented in the Office Action mailed 8/12/2025 in Application 18/649,946.
Any comments considered necessary by Applicant must be submitted no later than the payment of the issue fee and, to avoid processing delays, should preferably accompany the issue fee. Such submissions should be clearly labeled “Comments on Statement of Reasons for Allowance.”
Conclusion
6. The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant’s disclosure. Pannuto et al., (P. Pannuto, W. Wang, P. Dutta and B. Campbell, "A Modular and Adaptive Architecture for Building Applications with Connected Devices," 2018 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Internet (ICII), Seattle, WA, USA, 2018, pp. 1-12), discloses, see e.g., “…Smart and connected devices offer enormous potential to enable context-aware, localized, and multi-device orchestrations that could substantially increase the reach and utility of computing. The growth of these applications has been hampered, however, as devices, their data, and their control have been largely sequestered to their own vendor-specific APIs, clouds, and applications—a largely stove-piped state of affairs. Where barriers between devices have been pierced, the connections often occur between vendor clouds, affecting the latency, privacy, and reliability of the original application, while simultaneously increasing complexity. Locally executing applications have not materialized as devices with incompatible communication protocols, inconsistent APIs, and incongruent data models rarely communicate. We claim that what is needed to unlock the application potential is an architecture tailored to facilitating applications composed of networked devices. Our proposed architecture addresses this by providing a port-based abstraction for devices using a small wrapper layer. This device abstraction provides a consistent view of devices, and embeddable runtimes provide existing applications straightforward access to devices. The architecture also supports device discovery, shared interfaces between devices, and an application specification interface that promotes creating device-agnostic applications capable of operating even when devices change. We demonstrate the efficacy of our architecture with two application case studies that highlight the abstraction layers between applications and devices and employ the embeddability of our system to add new functionality to existing systems...” (See e.g., Nemer et al., Abstract).
Please, see for additional references PTO-892.
7. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Edgar Guerra-Erazo whose telephone number is (571) 270-3708. The examiner can normally be reached on M-F 7:30a.m.-5:00p.m. EST. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner's supervisor, Bhavesh Mehta can be reached on (571) 272-7453. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is (571) 273-8300.
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/EDGAR X GUERRA-ERAZO/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2656
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