[HN Gopher] Microsoft patent: Creating a conversational chat bot...
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Microsoft patent: Creating a conversational chat bot of a specific
person
Author : deesep
Score : 75 points
Date : 2021-01-04 10:15 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (patft.uspto.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (patft.uspto.gov)
| unrevelant wrote:
| Seems like a less advanced, but clearly more automatable version
| of the South Korean mother who was able to see her deceased
| 7-year-old in VR[0][1]. A friend of mine wrote a short story
| about this sort of thing a couple of years ago[2]. We actually
| spoke about it, and it got me to wondering what the business
| model of a service like this could be. Subscribing to receive
| videos from and communicate with a deceased relative.
| "Unsubscribing" would be like condemning them to the grave
| yourself. It's gross and scummy, but I could definitely see it
| being backed. Money on the table, I guess.
|
| [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/
| disabled wrote:
| The problem with making a "digital copy of oneself" for
| posthumous use is that it can cause a pathological grieving state
| for your loved ones.
|
| If you are thinking about doing it--don't.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| I wish chatbots would follow my dead loved ones to the grave
| st1x7 wrote:
| The current state of chatbots is embarrasingly bad. I still
| haven't seen a chatbot use-case that can't be solved better
| with an FAQ section + documentation search and a human as
| second line of support.
| krageon wrote:
| In all fairness I used to hate them but I have seen one or
| two customer support bots used in a way that definitely
| helped me get the answers I needed. Perhaps the fact that
| these bots are generally set up by consultants that
| understand search rather than some random intern that
| probably set up the documentation search is the deciding
| factor there.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I use Alexa on a daily-basis - which can be seen as a
| chatbot. It provides plenty of useful functionality,
| especially Alexa-auto which I bought my wife for Christmas.
| She loves the ability to add items to her todo list whilst
| driving, asking it questions about the weather, playing
| music, performing communcation tasks, etc.
| st1x7 wrote:
| > I use Alexa on a daily-basis - which can be seen as a
| chatbot.
|
| 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.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I don't get the hate for chatbots. Sure they are not perfect
| yet (it's a hard problem to solve!) but I see them as early-
| stage technology, which will improve over time.
|
| No comment on this news article though.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| Chatbot mania began in 2016, it's now 2021 what major
| improvements have there been? What's one website that has a
| good chatbot?
|
| 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.
| grawprog wrote:
| I've personally played some text adventure games from the
| 90's with better input recognition than some customer
| service chatbots. They almost feel like trying to figure
| out the commands from those games sometimes.
|
| '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.
| detaro wrote:
| People don't particularly care if they will improve over time
| if they are made to deal with broken early-stage technology
| _now_.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Hope it works better than their racist chatbot, Tay.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-twitter-bot-idU...
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| The amount of brain power and financial resources these companies
| have amassed for the purpose of generating targeted ads or HMIs,
| is disconcerting.
|
| 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.
| wilhil wrote:
| Remembering the start of the film Idiocracy and how many
| resources have been spent on erection pills...
| webmaven wrote:
| ...and hair loss.
| elmo2you wrote:
| Let's not forget that this is a commercial company.
|
| 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
| kleiba wrote:
| I remember reading about a startup that already did that. If I
| recall correctly, it developed organically out of a situation
| where the founder had actually lost a friend and trained a chat-
| bot on their email backlog.
|
| Later she realized that there might be a business idea in this.
|
| Does anyone recall that article?
| loldot_ wrote:
| Sounds a bit like this article:
| https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo...
|
| haven't had the time to read all of it again and can't recall
| all of it, so might not be the one.
| kleiba wrote:
| I don't remember the exact details either but I believe this
| is it. Thanks for digging it up.
|
| Now, wouldn't that constitute prior art wrt. the patent
| application?
| moebis wrote:
| I had this exact same idea 2 years ago. My wife said it wasn't
| worth pursuing. lol
| Ensorceled wrote:
| To be fair, this doesn't prove her wrong ... they haven't made
| money from it yet.
| cvaidya1986 wrote:
| Isn't this the founding idea of Replika ?
| Closi wrote:
| In terms of the patent, I can't actually read anywhere that says
| the intent or a use case is specifically to create chatbots for
| dead loved ones.
|
| 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.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| (Software) patents are protectionist bullshit and against the
| notion of a free market
| powerapple wrote:
| Yes, software should be copyrighted. Ideas should not be
| patentable.
| keiferski wrote:
| _When the construct laughed, it came through as something else,
| not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case's spine._
|
| _"Do me a favor, boy."_
|
| _"What's that, Dix?"_
|
| _"This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam
| thing."_
| elliottcarlson wrote:
| Black Mirror feels like prior art here...
| the-dude wrote:
| Isn't a patent a protection for the way it is implemented vs
| the idea itself?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| The lines have blurred. Algorithms have been patented as have
| things like 1-click purchasing.
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| Algorithms remain unpatenable.
|
| 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.
| m12k wrote:
| See also the Dixie Flatline construct from Neuromancer (1984),
| an AI-reconstruction of a brilliant hacker
| https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Construct
| Timpy wrote:
| Permutation City deals with the artificial consciousnesses
| too
| fimdomeio wrote:
| Exactly. Also I remember some company trying to do that (not
| sure if before or after the Black Mirror episode)
| danboarder wrote:
| https://replika.ai/ has been doing this type of work. See the
| origin story in length on the Lex Fridman AI podcast:
| https://youtu.be/_AGPbvCDBCk
| netsharc wrote:
| I know 1 story of not a company but a programmer:
| https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-
| memo...
| flemhans wrote:
| Ars Technica coverage: https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2016/07/luka-...
| snaut wrote:
| And before that, Stanislaw Lem's novels.
| gmuslera wrote:
| A work of fiction can count as prior art? It is not like anyone
| would not have tried to do something similar in practice,
| before or after that, but the episode itself?
|
| In any case, that episode qualifies both as prior, and art.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Yes, there's the waterbed case from Robert Heinlein ...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed#Heinlein_descriptions
| dalu wrote:
| This should not be permitted that someone files a patent of
| something so common. That's not what patents should be.
|
| I'm disgusted by how corrupt the system is
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| The claims define the protected inventions. In this example,
| claim 1 recites a very specific way to implement a chat bot.
|
| "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?
| curation wrote:
| The system is not corrupt. The system is authoritarian
| capitalism controlled by international capital. We can keep
| asking the wrong questions or act.
| whatshisface wrote:
| New proposed rule: All patents must be accompanied by a working
| prototype that encompasses _all claims._ Anything not
| implemented in the prototype is not in the patent.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> New proposed rule: All patents must be accompanied by a
| working prototype that encompasses all claims. Anything not
| implemented in the prototype is not in the patent._
|
| 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.
| asddubs wrote:
| patents just shouldn't exist at all
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| The claims are what is patented, not the simplistic headline, nor
| the discussions that do not analyze the claims in detail.
|
| For all the outrage, not a single post here yet discusses the
| actual claims.
| Applejinx wrote:
| "It looks like you're grieving. Would you like help with that?"
| jmugan wrote:
| Funny. I filed a patent for this same thing in 2015 and it was
| rejected for not being novel.
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160332079A1/en
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| From looking at your application, you were not patenting a
| chatbot, but a vastly different thing. The word "chat" only
| appears once in your application, but only as an input source,
| not a conversation tool.
| johnisgood wrote:
| But is a chat bot novel?
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| Some are. It depends on how they work. Remember utility
| patents are about how things work, not what they are.
|
| There are probably 1000's of issued patents for chat bots
| each one claiming different _hows_.
| jmugan wrote:
| The chatbot part was a subset of what I was doing.
| jmugan wrote:
| It was the patent application supporting Happy Cyborg https
| ://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140927011544-42285562-you-a...
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| The patent app you linked doesn't mention a chatbot in
| any claims, which is all that matters. Saying it was for
| some project has zero relevance to the patent system.
|
| Care to list the claims in your patent you think are the
| same as the MS claims?
| jmugan wrote:
| "Chatting" is just another kind of action.
| kerng wrote:
| Why can this be patented? I mean I also had this idea long ago
| and it's not anywhere novel.
| vernie wrote:
| https://frinkiac.com/meme/S08E21/1147896.jpg?b64lines=IFlPVS...
| pjc50 wrote:
| Looking forward to Microsoft claiming copyright over my
| grandmother.
| st1x7 wrote:
| Why does my grandmother have to force an update every time I
| restart her...
| Ygg2 wrote:
| We find your bloodline in violation of our copyright.
|
| Please comply with our Cease to Exist order.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I created a Markov chain bot from my friend's log files. Is it a
| "conversational chat bot of a specific person"?
| jrsj wrote:
| Someone doesn't necessarily have to be dead for this to work
| either, which is a little disturbing. Or in my case I want to
| hook this up to my work Slack so I can take a bathroom break
| without someone complaining about me being AFK for a couple
| minutes.
| krageon wrote:
| You can have a bot reply with "ah! Give me a second" or
| something along those lines while you're away. There's no need
| for a sophisticated solution, as people already know you're a
| person and are thus not very likely to suspect a bot (assuming
| you don't tell anyone that is).
| c22 wrote:
| I used to do this while botting MUDs. Immortals
| (administrators) would check up on you occasionally, so first
| my script would send a _" mis-channel"_ communication to make
| it look like I was actively talking to someone else, then a
| quick "Ack, sorry" followed by a pause and a "one second".
| All while simultaneously sending me an SMS so I can take over
| the communication stream in person.
| Insanity wrote:
| I think you might just need a better job if someone complains
| about that..
| netsharc wrote:
| It would then be another Black Mirror episode, the USS
| Callister one, where (spoilers:) introvert programmer Matt
| Damon takes DNA of his colleagues and makes virtual copies of
| them and imprisons them in his play universe.
|
| 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..
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Yep, we've seen that episode
|
| https://youtu.be/IWIusSdn1e4
| 2sk21 wrote:
| I am pretty sure that I already read about a version of this in a
| science fiction story written by Charles Sheffield in the 1990s!
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I told you this was going to happen! Some month ago I wrote a
| comment predicting exactly this.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| But can it generate automated comments, to capture the spirit of
| long-gone forums posters?
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