ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,500,857, issued on Dec. 16, was assigned to Pypestream Inc. (New York).

"Systems and methods for navigating nodes in channel based chatbots using natural language understanding" was invented by Richard Smullen (New York), Joerg Habermeier (San Francisco) and Soren Larson (New York).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The disclosed systems and methods join a user to a primary communication channel that is associated with an automated human interface module. The automated human interface module includes a plurality of nodes. A message including a text communication is posted by the user and sent to a decision module associated with a plurality o...