US Patent Issued to International Business Machines on Nov. 4 for "Relationship-driven virtual assistant" (California, North Carolina, Texas Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,462,812, issued on Nov. 4, was assigned to International Business Machines Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.).

"Relationship-driven virtual assistant" was invented by Ashok Kumar Iyengar (Encinitas, Calif.), Trudy L. Hewitt (Cary, N.C.), Venkata Vishwanath Gadepalli (Apex, N.C.) and Jeremy R. Fox (Georgetown, Texas).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A computer-implemented method, a computer system and a computer program product generate a query response in an environment based on predicted relationships between users. The method includes capturing a question with a device in the environment, where the question includes a speaking voice and is selected from...