Methods and apparatus for determining, based on features of an electronic communication and schedule data of a user, reply content for inclusion in a reply by the user to the electronic communication

• US 10,243,890 B2
• Filed: 01/12/2016
• Issued: 03/26/2019
• Est. Priority Date: 01/12/2016
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Google LLC (Alphabet Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Google LLC (Alphabet Inc.)
• Inventors: Miklos, Balint, Emeagwali, Ijeoma, Schieffer, Stella, Hart, Katie, Aroner, Jonathan, Sharp, Phillip, Shin, Jung-won, Ganea, Marina
• Primary Examiner(s): Khan, Aftab N.
• Application Number:
  US14/994,113
• Publication Number:
  US 20170201471A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,169 Days
• Field of Search: 709245
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/00 Administration; Management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/109 Time management, e.g. calendars, reminders, meetings or time accounting
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/1093 Calendar-based scheduling for persons or groups
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/02 using automatic reactions or user delegation, e.g. automatic replies or chatbot-generated messages

Abstract

Methods and apparatus related to determining reply content for a reply to an electronic communication and providing the reply content for inclusion in the reply. Some of those implementations are directed to determining, based on an electronic communication that includes an event and is sent to a user, reply content that is tailored to the electronic communication and tailored to schedule data of the user that is temporally related to the event, and providing the reply content for inclusion in a reply by the user to the electronic communication. For example, the reply content may be automatically included in the reply and/or suggested for inclusion in the reply.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method, comprising:

identifying, by one or more computing devices, an electronic communication sent to a user;

determining, by one or more of the computing devices, a temporal indication associated with an event of the electronic communication, the temporal indication identifying at least a time or date associated with the event;

searching, by one or more of the computing devices, schedule data of the user based on the temporal indication;

determining, by one or more of the computing devices and based on the searching, availability of the user for the event;

determining, by one or more of the computing devices, one or more additional message features of the electronic communication, the additional message features being in addition to the temporal indication;

generating, by one or more of the computing devices, textual reply content based on the availability of the user to whom the electronic communication is sent and based on the one or more additional message features of the electronic communication, the textual reply content including one or more n-grams that are not included in the electronic communication;

providing, by one or more of the computing devices, the textual reply content for inclusion in a reply electronic communication that is a reply, by the user to whom the electronic communication is sent, to the electronic communication, wherein providing the textual reply content for inclusion in the reply electronic communication comprises providing, via a graphical user interface, a graphical indication of the textual reply content,

wherein providing the textual reply content for inclusion in the reply electronic communication comprises providing the graphical indication of the textual reply content when the electronic communication is being viewed by the user and before the user has provided any user interface input indicating a desire to reply to the electronic communication;

receiving, via the graphical user interface, a selection of the graphical indication via a user interface input device; and

in response to receiving the selection, automatically incorporating the textual reply content in a body of the reply electronic communication.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein providing the textual reply content for inclusion in the reply electronic communication comprises:

providing a graphical indication of the textual reply content and providing a graphical indication that the textual reply content is based on the availability of the user.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein providing the textual reply content for inclusion in the reply electronic communication comprises:

incorporating the textual reply content in the reply electronic communication without requiring confirmation by the user via user interface input initiated by the user.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein generating the textual reply content comprises generating a first reply n-gram and generating a separate second reply n-gram;

and

wherein providing the reply content for inclusion in the reply electronic communication comprises;

providing a first graphical indication of the first reply n-gram and a second graphical indication of the second reply n-gram;

receiving a selection of one of the first graphical indication and the second graphical indication via a user interface input device; and

in response to receiving the selection, incorporating a corresponding one of the first reply n-gram and the second reply n-gram in the reply.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein searching the schedule data of the user occurs independent of any textual input provided via a computing device of the user in generating the reply electronic communication, wherein the computing device of the user is one of the computing devices or is in addition to the computing devices.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 5, wherein providing the textual reply content for inclusion in the reply electronic communication occurs independent of any textual input provided via the computing device in generating the reply electronic communication.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein determining the temporal indication associated with the event of the electronic communication comprises:

determining the temporal indication based on one or more temporal n-grams of the electronic communication.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 7, further comprising:

determining one or more event n-grams of the electronic communication that each reference a location of the event or a type of the event; and

determining the temporal n-grams based on a syntactic relationship between the temporal n-grams and the event n-grams in the electronic communication.

9. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein generating the textual reply content comprises generating a first reply n-gram and generating a separate second reply n-gram;

and

wherein providing the reply content for inclusion in the reply electronic communication comprises;

providing both the first reply n-gram and the second reply n-gram for inclusion in the reply to the electronic communication.

10. The computer-implemented method of claim 9, further comprising:

ranking the first reply n-gram and the second reply n-gram relative to one another; and

determining, based on the ranking, a prominence for providing the first reply n-gram and the second reply n-gram;

wherein providing the first reply n-gram and the second reply n-gram for inclusion in the reply electronic communication comprises providing the first reply n-gram and the second reply n-gram with an indication of the prominences.

11. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein generating the textual reply content comprises:

providing the additional message features and the availability of the user as input to a trained machine learning system;

receiving at least one reply content feature as output from the trained machine learning system; and

generating the textual reply content based on the at least one reply content feature received as output from the trained machine learning system.

12. The computer-implemented method of claim 11, wherein the additional message features comprise a first message feature based on an n-gram in a body of the electronic communication.

13. The computer-implemented method of claim 12, further comprising:

labeling, by one or more of the computing devices, each of a plurality of n-grams of the electronic communication with at least one corresponding grammatical annotation;

wherein determining the first message feature comprises selecting the n-gram based on the corresponding grammatical annotation of the n-gram, and determining the first message feature based on the n-gram.

14. A computer-implemented method, comprising:

identifying a corpus of event electronic communications of a plurality of users, the event electronic communications of the corpus each including original content that references an event, each including reply content that is responsive to the original content, and each being associated with user availability of an author of the reply content, wherein the user availability indicates availability of the author, when the reply content was authored, to attend the event;

generating a plurality of training examples based on the event electronic communications, wherein generating each of the training examples is based on a corresponding event electronic communication of the event electronic communications and comprises;

generating a plurality of input features based on the original content of the corresponding event electronic communication and the user availability associated with the corresponding reply event electronic communication, and

generating at least one output feature based on the reply content of the corresponding event electronic communication;

training a machine learning system based on the training examples to generate a trained machine learning system;

receiving a new electronic communication sent to a user;

generating new input features based on the new electronic communication and based on schedule data of the user;

providing the new input features as input to the trained machine learning system;

receiving output from the trained machine learning system in response to providing the new input features to the trained machine learning system;

using the output from the trained machine learning system to determine reply content for providing the reply content for presentation to the user, via a graphical user interface of a computing device of the user, for inclusion in a reply by the user to the new electronic communication;

providing, via a graphical user interface, the reply content for inclusion in the reply electronic communication when the electronic communication is being viewed via the computing device and before any user interface input is provided at the computing device indicating a desire to reply to the electronic communication; and

in response to receiving a selection of the reply content via the graphical user interface, automatically incorporating the reply content in a body of the reply by the user to the new electronic communication.

15. The computer-implemented method of claim 14, wherein the at least one output feature indicates whether the reply content includes an invite or a link to an invite.

16. The computer-implemented method of claim 14, wherein the at least one output feature indicates whether the reply content includes an availability poll or a link to an availability poll.

17. The computer-implemented method of claim 14, wherein the at least one output feature indicates at least one textual feature of the reply content.

18. The computer-implemented method of claim 14, wherein the input features of the training examples do not include any features from the reply content.

19. A system, comprising:

an electronic communication stored in one or more non-transitory computer readable media, the electronic communication sent to a user;

at least one processor;

memory coupled to the processor, wherein the memory stores instructions to be executed by the processor to perform steps comprising;

determining a temporal indication associated with an event of the electronic communication, the temporal indication identifying at least a time or date associated with the event;

searching schedule data of the user based on the temporal indication;

determining, based on the searching, availability of the user for the event;

determining one or more additional message features of the electronic communication, the additional message features being in addition to the temporal indication;

generating textual reply content based on the availability of the user and based on the one or more additional message features, the textual reply content including one or more n-grams that are not included in the electronic communication;

providing the textual reply content for inclusion in a reply electronic communication that is a reply by the user to the electronic communication, wherein providing the textual reply content for inclusion in the reply electronic communication comprises providing, via a graphical user interface, a graphical indication of the textual reply content,

wherein providing the textual reply content for inclusion in the reply electronic communication comprises providing the graphical indication of the textual reply content when the electronic communication is being viewed by the user and before the user has provided any user interface input indicating a desire to reply to the electronic communication;

receiving, via the graphical user interface, a selection of the graphical indication via a user interface input device of the graphical user interface; and

in response to receiving the selection, automatically incorporating the textual reply content in a body of the reply electronic communication.