Call routing based on the caller's mood
patents.google.com
patents.google.com
... so last time I was on the phone with my ISP about the issue of ipv6 availability and after waiting for the surpringly short, yet still infuriatingly long time of 55 minutes, I got a hold of a clueless operator, only to be dropped at exactly the 60 minute mark.
Calling back swearing and pressing all the buttons ( so it had been my third or fourth time trying to get through that day... not so proud of it) yielded a different operator after almost 30 seconds. Judging by the way he handled my call (I didn't continue swearing, the people answering the phone are not at fault for shitty staffing decisions), I can only assume he was specially trained.
( I continue to be unsuccessfull in even having any ISP representing operator understand either what ipv6 even is or comprehend that while they claim it's available, it is not. I continue to not understand how they haven't been trained to be just aware that a thing called "the internet protocol" exists while they work for a company whose primary product is the provision of said protocol. )
On the other hand I discovered a shortcut though their automated phone system. I just don't think the reward system is biased to the bettering of humanity there...
Either let me fix it myself, dont have fucking braindead "policies" that are anti-customer, and bloody respond when someone has a problem.
Recently had an ebay stupid. Because a bit was flipped differently than they thought it should be on their backend, gave random bullshit errors.
The procedure here should be: fix your goddamned system to autocorrect it, or automatically put me in touch with a chat agent to fix it on their end.
...although the one time it didn't work, it turned out the other end was (probably, I'm still not sure...) a human who just acted inanely robotic, and nonetheless completely unhelpful.
For me it's "Fucking get me to a fucking live person you motherfucking piece of shit!", shouted at the top of my lungs, followed up by a random litany of whatever insults and other curse words come to the top of my head.
I cannot stand those systems, and I will use every cheat in the book to bypass them.
I absolutely, utterly cannot stand systems where they require you to speak your answers into the menu instead of pushing buttons on your phone. I'll try and get out of it by hammering 0 a few dozen times, but if it won't let me do that, I'll just start shouting curse words into the phone until it transfers me to a live person. It usually works.
Once I'm speaking to a human, though, I act very politely and describe my issue with lots of details so I don't get a generic answer.
By that logic, one could patent a machine for finding better hiring candidates by running their CVs through a "programming skills detector" and "soft skills detector", then filtering based on their output.
It probably wasn’t quite so obvious back then, though still it’s more or less just chaining a few other other patented things together in a fairly straightforward way. (It is interesting to note that the speech-analysis-for-emotion-detection patent it cites had just expired a few months prior. I do not know if that is significant or not.)
As if any self respecting engineer would design a device with sharp corners.
Which is not only incredibly obvious, but also has a decade of prior art that could potentially invalidate it. Though I think was the USPTO is allowing here is the described mechanisms behind the concepts, not the concepts themselves.
The USPTO has a very specific goal: to maximize the number of patents which are granted, so long as they are valid by the USPTO's rules.
Those rules do not require or even allow for a working example or model of the claimed invention(s). They also define the term "non-obvious" in a remarkably non-obvious way.
Look at the great many "something obvious ON THE INTERNET" patents that are out there and in some cases being enforced.
This is not a patent on voice analysis algorithms to detect a human's mood, it's just taking an existing invented workflow and replacing "human analysis" with "computer analysis".