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Office Guardian Angel Worse Than Clippy
ZWilder writes "Remember 'Clippy', the annoying anthropomorphic paper clip foisted upon unsuspecting users of Office? Well Microsoft has taken the concept behind Clippy and 'turned the dial up to 11' with its new, even more intrusive animated life-coach, known as 'Guardian Angel.' Patented in 2006, Guardian Angel is 'an intelligent personalized agent' that 'monitors and evaluates a user's environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user.' Like a manlier Fairy Godmother. Or a similarly omniscient HAL from '2001: A Space Oddysey.'"
...an early April Fool's joke.
Slashdot: The only place where 4 year old patents are news!
This isn't "Clippy 2.0". This is applied AI research that's more than ten years from making it into any real product, and it's a field a lot of companies are researching. From what I've read so far it's really far too vague and generic for anyone to deserve a patent on it, but the patent will probably expire before Microsoft has the opportunity to sue anyone over it.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The guardian angel can take automated action on behalf of the user for various purposes (e.g., to compensate for memory loss, to remind a user to take medicine, to assist in social interactions by indicating whether the user has met an individual before, to gauge the appropriateness of jokes or comments given the demographics of the audience, etc.).
I'm slightly confused... Microsoft does this while complaining about privacy intrusion? I suppose the information may not be sent back to Microsoft as in Chrome's case, couldn't this be bad if some random person saw or got hold of that information? There's already a site that does that.
also:
[T]he monitoring component can take note of the number of conversations occurring in a room (and more specifically, a breakdown of the types of people in the room accompanied by a warning for dangerous persons, based on sex offender registration, FBI most wanted, etc.). The monitoring component sends relevant information for current or future decisions to the decision-making component that analyzes the information within the context of personal preference data stored in the user-attribute store in order to make a suggestion or implement a decision.
Where are the "decision-making component" and "user attribute store" located? Is it sending names for inspection across the internet just because their name is mentioned in a conversation? I hate to think that anyone's computer might be dropping eaves on me at any given moment. :)
Meow meeoooww purrrrrrr miau, mrow!
We tend to find animated "helpers" annoying. Please stop.
Yours,
People
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Is it a business letter or a personal letter?
$ make available
The patent has very little content; it's another one of those "hey, here is an application we want to patent, now everbody get to work and build the technology behind it for us". It's like patenting the idea of processing text on a computer or using a computer for performing addition. It's evil.