Digital Assistant Context Sharing Across Devices

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Solution Overview

Problem

Current intelligent automated assistants face challenges in seamlessly sharing context and performing tasks across multiple devices, leading to inefficiencies and fragmented user experiences due to limitations in context sharing and task execution.

Innovation Solution

The implementation of a digital assistant system that utilizes a client-server model with a context collector mechanism, allowing for context sharing and task performance across multiple devices, enabling continuous conversations and multimodal task execution through advanced event handling and ontology-based task determination.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Adaptability or versatility

If a digital assistant operates on a single electronic device, then the device can independently process user requests, but context sharing and task performance across multiple devices are fragmented and inefficient

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvecontext sharing capabilityVSAvoidsystem architecture complexity
Core Design Contradiction:
Adaptability or versatilityVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The patent segments the digital assistant functionality into distinct components: a context collector service that gathers context information from multiple devices, a task determination service that processes user requests, and device-specific assistant clients. This segmentation allows context to be collected centrally while maintaining distributed device independence, resolving the contradiction between multi-device adaptability and system complexity.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #1Segmentation

Solution Approach 2:

The patent introduces a context collector service as an intermediary component that mediates between multiple devices and the task determination service. This intermediary collects context information from various devices, standardizes it, and makes it available to the task determination service, enabling seamless context sharing without requiring direct complex inter-device communication.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #24Intermediary (Mediator)

2Reliability

If context information is collected from multiple devices, then continuous conversations and multimodal task execution are enabled, but the system requires advanced event handling and ontology-based task determination mechanisms

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvecontinuous conversation capabilityVSAvoidevent handling mechanism complexity
Core Design Contradiction:
ReliabilityVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The patent implements preliminary action by having the context collector service proactively gather and store context information from multiple devices before tasks are executed. Event handlers pre-process incoming events, extract relevant context, and store it in a standardized format. This preliminary context preparation enables reliable continuous conversations without requiring complex real-time processing during task execution.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #10Preliminary action

Solution Approach 2:

The patent transforms context information from diverse device formats into a standardized parameter structure through the context collector. By changing the parameter representation of context data into a unified ontology-based format, the system enables reliable task determination across multiple devices while keeping event handling mechanisms manageable through standardization.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #35Parameter changes

Data Source

PatentEP3910467B1Digital assistant hardware abstraction
Publication Date: 2025.03.26 APPLE INC
  • EP3910467B1 patent drawingFigure 1
  • EP3910467B1 patent drawingFigure 2A
  • EP3910467B1 patent drawingFigure 2B

AI summary

This relates to intelligent automated assistants and, more specifically, to intelligent context sharing and task performance among a collection of devices with intelligent automated assistant capabilities. An example method includes, at a first electronic device participating in a context-sharing group associated with a first location: receiving a user voice input; receiving, from a context collector, an aggregate context of the context-sharing group; providing at least a portion of the aggregate context and data corresponding to the user voice input to a remote device; receiving, from the remote device, a command to perform one or more tasks and a device identifier corresponding to a second electronic device; and transmitting the command to the second electronic device based on the device identifier, wherein the command causes the second electronic device to perform the one or more tasks.