INTERACTIVE VOICE-CONTROLLED COMPANION APPLICATION FOR A VIDEO GAME

• US 20200129851A1
• Filed: 09/30/2019
• Published: 04/30/2020
• Est. Priority Date: 06/30/2017
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Electronic Arts Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Electronic Arts Incorporated
• Inventors: Sardari, Mohsen, Moss, Kenneth Alan, Zaman, Kazi Atif-Uz, Aghdaie, Navid, Kolen, John, Mattar, Mohamed Marwan
• Granted Patent: US 11,077,361 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• CPC Class Codes: A63F 13/215 comprising means for detecting acoustic signals, e.g. using a microphone
• CPC Class Codes: A63F 13/352 involving special game server arrangements, e.g. regional servers connected to a national server or a plurality of servers managing partitions of the game world
• CPC Class Codes: A63F 13/424 involving acoustic input signals, e.g. by using the results of pitch or rhythm extraction or voice recognition
• CPC Class Codes: A63F 13/45 Controlling the progress of the video game
• CPC Class Codes: A63F 13/79 involving player-related data, e.g. identities, accounts, preferences or play histories
• CPC Class Codes: A63F 2300/6027 using adaptive systems learning from user actions, e.g. for skill level adjustment
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/167 Audio in a user interface, e.g. using voice commands for navigating, audio feedback
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 20/00 Machine learning
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 20/20 Ensemble learning
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 3/044 Recurrent networks, e.g. Hopfield networks
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 3/047 Probabilistic or stochastic networks
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 5/01 Dynamic search techniques; Heuristics; Dynamic trees; Branch-and-bound
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 5/025 Extracting rules from data
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 5/04 Inference or reasoning models
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 7/01 Probabilistic graphical models, e.g. probabilistic networks
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/26 Speech to text systems G10L15/08 takes precedence

Abstract

Using voice recognition, a user can interact with a companion application to control a video game from a mobile device. Advantageously, the user can interact with the companion application when the video game is unavailable because, for example, of the user'"'"'s location. Moreover, machine learning may be used to facilitate generating voice responses to user utterances that are predicted to improve or maintain a user'"'"'s level of engagement with the companion application, or its corresponding video game.

Claims

1-20. -20. (canceled)

21. A computer-implemented method comprising:

as implemented by an interactive computing system configured with specific computer-executable instructions,

receiving an utterance from a user computing device, the utterance comprising one or more spoken words associated with a video game;

determining an action responsive to the utterance;

determining the video game associated with the utterance, the video game being one of a plurality of video games;

identifying a user account associated with the utterance; and

performing the action with respect to the user account and the video game, wherein the interactive computing system is separate from a host system that hosts at least a portion of the video game.

22. The computer-implemented method of claim 21, wherein the utterance is received from a companion application hosted by the user computing device, the companion application being distinct from the video game.

23. The computer-implemented method of claim 21, wherein performing the action comprises:

executing at least a first portion of an instance of the video game at the host system configured to host at least the portion of the video game; and

executing within the instance of the video game a command associated with the action on behalf of a user associated with the user account without the user accessing the video game.

24. The computer-implemented method of claim 23, wherein performing the action further comprises:

loading a video game account within the instance of the video game associated with the user; and

executing the command with respect to the video game account.

25. The computer-implemented method of claim 24, wherein the video game account is linked with the user account.

26. The computer-implemented method of claim 23, wherein performing the action further comprises:

instantiating a headless client configured to execute at least a second portion of the instance of the video game; and

executing the second portion of the instance of the video game at the headless client, wherein executing the command within the instance of the video game comprises executing the command using the headless client.

27. The computer-implemented method of claim 21, wherein the utterance comprises a query and the action responsive to the utterance comprises determining a query response.

28. The computer-implemented method of claim 27, wherein determining the query response comprises:

accessing one or more knowledge sources associated with the query, at least one of the one or more knowledge sources comprising a repository of game-state information associated with the video game; and

determining the query response based at least in part on data obtained from the one or more knowledge sources.

29. The computer-implemented method of claim 28, further comprising transmitting the query response to the user computing device.

30. The computer-implemented method of claim 28, wherein determining the query response further comprises:

accessing user interaction data for a user;

determining one or more eligible query responses based at least in part on the data obtained from the one or more knowledge sources;

determining a score for each of the one or more eligible query responses based on the user interaction data and a parameter function, the parameter function generated based at least in part on a machine learning algorithm; and

selecting the query response from the one or more eligible query responses based at least in part on the score for each of the one or more eligible query responses.

31. The computer-implemented method of claim 30, wherein the user interaction data comprises interactions by the user with respect to one or more of the video game or a companion application that receives the utterance.

32. The computer-implemented method of claim 21, further comprising performing a voice recognition process on the utterance to identify one or more words included in the utterance, wherein the action is determined based at least in part on the one or more words.

33. A system comprising:

an application host system configured to host at least a portion of an instance of a video game; and

an interactive computing system comprising one or more hardware processors, the interactive computing system configured to execute specific computer-executable instructions to at least;

receive a query from a user computing device, the query associated with the video game;

determine an action responsive to the query;

determine the video game associated with the query, the video game one of a plurality of video games;

identify a user account associated with the query; and

perform the action with respect to the user account and the video game.

34. The system of claim 33, wherein the query is received as an utterance captured by the user computing device.

35. The system of claim 33, wherein the query is received from a companion application hosted by the user computing device, the companion application a separate application from the video game.

36. The system of claim 33, wherein the action comprises determining a query response, and wherein the interactive computing system is further configured to determine the query response by at least:

accessing one or more knowledge sources associated with the video game; and

determining the query response based at least in part on data obtained from the one or more knowledge sources.

37. The system of claim 36, wherein at least one of the one or more knowledge sources comprises a repository of game-state information associated with the video game.

38. The system of claim 36, wherein the interactive computing system is further configured to transmit the query response to the user computing device.

39. The system of claim 33, wherein the action comprises executing a command with respect to the instance of the video game.

40. The system of claim 39, wherein the interactive computing system is further configured to perform the action by at least:

loading a video game account within the instance of the video game, the video game account associated with the user account; and

executing the command with respect to the video game account.