[ontolog-forum] Siri's (Apple) Patent Application

[Ali SH <asaegyn+out@xxxxxxxxx>]

A few years ago Adam Cheyer and Tom Gruber were kind enough to present an overview of Siri on ontolog ( http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2010_02_25 ), were subsequently bought out by Apple and a few weeks ago Apple released Siri as that "one more thing" part of their presentations - deeply integrating it into the iPhone4S and their new iOS'es. Some claim it is a break out point for mass acceptance of AI technologies, and its cultural / technological consequences are on par with the mouse or GUI's.

Regardless, I thought people here might be interested in their patent application, which is reviewed on this site:

http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/10/12/how-siri-on-iphone-4s-works-and-why-it%E2%80%99s-a-big-deal-apple%E2%80%99s-ai-tech-details-in-230-pages-of-patent-app/

while this one looks at the surrounding patent protections Siri and Apple (and I suppose SRI) may have built around the technologies ( http://startupsip.com/2011/10/14/is-apple-siri-ous-about-ip/ ). The claims on the '790 patent are incredibly broad

 

An automated assistant operating on a computing device, the assistant comprising:

1. an input device, for receiving user input;
2. a language interpreter component, for interpreting the received user input to derive a representation of user intent;
3. a dialog flow processor component, for identifying at least one domain, at least one task, and at least one parameter for the task, based at least in part on the derived representation of user intent;
4. a services orchestration component, for calling at least one service for performing the identified task;
5. an output processor component, for rendering output based on data received from the at least one called service, and further based at least in part on a current output mode; and
6. an output device, for outputting the rendered output.

Fwiw, I believe that Leonid Kravets has misunderstood the "language interpreter" claim, and I doubt Apple is referring to Nuance, but the NLP/ontology interpretation that Siri is doing w/ the Nuance speech-to-text strings...

There's recently been another, much narrower patent application to do with ontologies and NLP, titled "Method and system for generating an ontology" see: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,027,948.PN.&OS=PN/8,027,948&RS=PN/8,027,948 for more details.

Thoughts?

(•`'·.¸(`'·.¸(•)¸.·'´)¸.·'´•) .,.,

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