Microsoft patent: Creating a conversational chat bot of a specific person
patft.uspto.gov
patft.uspto.gov
Even if people will know it is a bot, these people's rational capacities will in most cased be diminished under such circumstances, at best. Many will be easily (emotionally) manipulable, even more than with all the psychological trickery in product advertisement and big data exploitation these days.
Opinion: this clearly crosses the line of criminal behaviors, exploiting people who are clearly in a vulnerable positions (at least more than usual). I think the track record of tech companies rather clearly shows that their promised of taking good care of collected data (and privacy) mean little to nothing. At the end of the day, they do this for profit. That's enough for me to make this cross the line.
Also, what's really the "invention" here? Would something like this ever deserve a patent monopoly? If you take (dead) people's personal data and build a neural net (or any other "AI") to mimic/compliment that data (needed for answering questions), have you not just done what any/every neural net already does? If we're going to call that novel and innovative, then hold my beer ... or is this just again a big tech company abusing the patent system to hijack an obvious (use of) technology, excluding anyone who doesn't belong to their cozy little cross-licensing inbreed family from using what should be free to use in the first place?
#end-of-rant
Maybe it's too much of an Arthur C. Clarke type fantasy but I always wonder what our world would be like if a substantial fraction of these billionaire budgets at Facebook, Google, Microsoft were spent on Natural Sciences, even if with a commercial scope narrowed to Applied Sciences.
[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/a-grieving-mother-meets-her-deceased... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uflTK8c4w0c&feature=youtu.be [2]: https://www.ectoplus.com/shorts/replacement/
Obviously the tech won't be that advanced, but having people have emotional connections to chatbots that they programmed to pretend to be their exes would be... creepy.
On the other hand I can imagine at least one Twitter user who we could put in a virtual playpen and it would benefit mankind.. Virtual Pennsylvania Ave 1600..
There are probably 1000's of issued patents for chat bots each one claiming different hows.
Care to list the claims in your patent you think are the same as the MS claims?
I haven't looked at the google patent listings before. What are the 'Similar Documents' at the bottom about? Black Twitter? https://patents.google.com/scholar/10521028305159378504
If you are thinking about doing it--don't.
More general virtual assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri) are at a completely different power level from most chatbots. Most chatbots use cases that I come across are some company thinking that they can replace human support with a language model trained on their custom knowledge base. They expect something as good as Alexa but which also has knowledge about the company's product and the results are always disappointing.
No comment on this news article though.
Chatbots are great until they don’t work which is all the time. You need to ask questions in a specific way to get an answer. From a user point of view it’s a terrible experience. Most companies don’t value the time of their users that’s why chatbots have been deployed on many websites.
'I need help with payment'
Sorry can you repeat your question
'Payment information'
Sorry can you repeat your question
'Help with payment information'
You need help?
Directing you to our FAQ section where you can get help for our most common questions.
Later she realized that there might be a business idea in this.
Does anyone recall that article?
haven't had the time to read all of it again and can't recall all of it, so might not be the one.
Now, wouldn't that constitute prior art wrt. the patent application?
In case Verge's story isn't the right one, here is another from Quartz that might be the coverage you remember:
https://classic.qz.com/machines-with-brains/1018126/lukas-re...
> situation where the founder had actually lost an employee and trained a chat-bot on their email backlog.
”Do me a favor, boy.”
“What’s that, Dix?”
“This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing.”
In any case, that episode qualifies both as prior, and art.
The claims of this patent recite a chat bot system that does specific things a certain way. If it does require a particular algorithm, the algorithm itself is not protected.
For all the outrage, not a single post here yet discusses the actual claims.
Please comply with our Cease to Exist order.
I'm disgusted by how corrupt the system is
Interesting rule. I'm not sure that a single prototype per patent is reasonable, though, given that claims may cover mutually exclusive claims and divergent use-cases.
A set of prototypes that collectively cover all claims (though not all possible combinations of claims) might work, except that the hard part might still be reducing to practice a particular combination of claims not in any of the prototypes.
Eg. A patent that has claims for electronic storage and playback of music and claims for a handheld data storage device (each claim embodied separately in prototypes) as well as the combination of a handheld device for electronic storage and playback of music (claim not embodied in a prototype).
I'm not sure how to construct the rules in such a way that you aren't either saddling inventors with the need to produce a huge number of prototypes representing a combinatorial explosion of claims and their combinations, nor allowing patent holders to extort subsequent inventors for inventions that they could never have reduced to practice themselves.
Leaving the determination of which combinations of claims to allow as "reducing to practice is left as an exercise for the engineer" up to the patent examiner still leaves in place the existing misalignment of incentives that the current system has, except it makes applying for patents more expensive.
"A method for creating a conversational chat bot of a specific entity, the method comprising: receiving a request associated with a specific entity; accessing social data associated with the specific entity, the social data comprising at least one of: images of the specific entity, voice data for the specific entity, conversational data associated with the specific entity, and publicly available information about the specific entity; processing the social data using at least one of machine learning techniques and one or more rule sets, wherein processing the social data comprises: identifying conversation data collected for the specific entity; identifying conversation data collected for one or more entities similar to the specific entity; and determining similarities between the one or more entities and the specific entity using at least one of expression analysis techniques, approval indicators, and characteristics comparisons; using the social data to create a personality index, wherein the personality index comprises personality information for the specific entity; and using the personality index to train a chat bot to interact conversationally using the personality information of the specific entity"
Is this really common?
And not very clear what personality index means in this context.
The headline is misleading - The technology could be used to create chatbots from your dead loved ones, but that isn't what the patent is about.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-twitter-bot-idU...