Hands-free multi-site web navigation and consumption

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-10796698-B2
Application number	US-201715674256-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Aug 10, 2017
Priority date	Aug 10, 2017
Publication date	Oct 6, 2020
Grant date	Oct 6, 2020

Abstract

A digital assistant supported on computing devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, personal computers (PCs), wearable devices, game consoles, connected car devices, virtual and mixed reality devices, and the like is configured to interact with a web browser to open multiple websites within a group responsively to a single voice input at a natural language interface. The user can select websites that are included in a given group through a user interface (UI), or the computing device may be configured to automatically create or recommend groups to the user based on monitored interactions and/or user behaviors (where the monitoring is performed with notice to the user and user consent).

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A method operating on a computing device that is associated with a user, the computing device having a user interface (UI), the method comprising:
configuring the UI to enable the user to select multiple websites for inclusion in a group, and to provide a name for the group of user-selected websites;
placing the multiple user-selected websites within the group and associating the user-provided name to the group;
monitoring utilization of the user-selected websites by the user;
listening for a voice input from the user using the user-provided name to open the group of user-selected websites within a browser;
in response to the voice input including the user-provided name for the group, filtering user-selected websites in the group based on the monitored utilization of the user-selected websites, such that certain websites of the user-selected websites within the group are identified for opening within the browser and other user-selected websites within the group are restricted from being opened within the browser; and
opening the identified ones of the user-selected websites in the group based on the filtering so that the opened websites are simultaneously executing, wherein the identified websites are opened in respective individual tabs within the browser

in which the filtering is performed to minimize resource utilization on the computing device by restricting opening of particular ones of the websites in the group, the resources including one or more of battery power, network bandwidth, processing cycles, or memory utilization.

2. The method of claim 1 further including caching content from the filtered user-selected websites in the group on the computing device and opening the cached content on the UI.

3. The method of claim 1 further including implementing a digital assistant on the computing device that supports interactions with the user with one or more of voice, gestures, or physical interactions with the computing device.

4. The method of claim 3 further including configuring the digital assistant to recognize the associated name and pass an instruction to the browser executing on the computing device to open remaining websites in the group.

5. The method of claim 4 further including configuring the digital assistant to read aloud to the user, using a text-to-speech conversion, content from the identified ones of the user-selected websites in the group.

6. The method of claim 1 further including performing the filtering according to one or more of frequency of website use, relevance, user history, or browsing pattern.

Assignees

• Microsoft Technology Licensing Llc

Inventors

• Liddell Derek Martin
• Yen Cheng-Yi
• Brown Darryl James
• Tian Ye
• Le Phu
• Moreira Isabela Cabral

Classifications

• G06F16/9562 Primary

  Bookmark management · CPC title

• G06F3/16

  Sound input; Sound output (speech processing G10L) · CPC title

• G10L15/26 Primary

  Speech to text systems (G10L15/08 takes precedence) · CPC title

• G10L15/30

  Distributed recognition, e.g. in client-server systems, for mobile phones or network applications · CPC title

• G06F16/9535

  Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation · CPC title