Microsoft Patents A User-Monitoring AI That Improves Search Results (hothardware.com)

Slashdot reader MojoKid quotes a HotHardware article about Microsoft's new patent filing for an OS "mediation component": This is Microsoft's all-seeing-eye that monitors all textual input within apps to intelligently decipher what the user is trying to accomplish. All of this information could be gathered from apps like Word, Skype, or even Notepad by the Mediator and processed. So when the user goes to, for example, the Edge web browser to further research a topic, those contextual concepts are automatically fed into a search query.

The search engine (e.g., Bing and Cortana) uses contextual rankers to adjust the ranking of the default suggested queries to produce more relevant [results]. The operating system...tracks all textual data displayed to the user by any application, and then performs clustering to determine the user intent (contextually).
The article argues this feels "creepy and big brother-esque," and while Microsoft talks of defining a "task continuum," suggests the patent's process "would in essence keep track of everything you type and interact with in the OS and stockpile it in real-time to data-dump into Bing."

Comments

prior art

[oever]

More than 10 years ago I wrote something similar for KDE. It was called Knapsack. It monitored all keys pressed on the X desktop, all text on the clipboard and the title of the active window. It used all that text to show files related to the users current activity.

Every time a user would click a suggested file, the system would get positive feedback about that suggestion in that context: it learned.

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail...