Patent decision

BL number

O/0370/24

Concerning rights in

GB2118630.9, GB2202901.1, GB2202902.9 and GB2202903.7

Hearing Officer

Mr B Buchanan

Decision date

25 April 2024

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Intradiem Inc

Provisions discussed

Patents Act 1977, Section 1(2)(c)

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

This decision concerns one ‘parent’ application and three divisional applications. All of the claimed inventions relate to a computing system for running a customer contact centre, enabling reducing agent device downtime, providing coaching to an agent device, optimising performance metrics and using machine learning to predict patterns of incoming communications to optimise operations. In all cases the Examiner had objected that the claimed inventions were excluded from patentability under Section 1(2)(c). The applicant argued that the invention provided a new way of updating a machine learning model, providing continual and tailored updates to individual computing instances in a network. They drew analogy in particular to the recent judgment in Emotional Perception AI and to PKTWO, arguing that the machine learning was of a kind that should be treated the same as an ANN, and that communication packets were analysed to subsequently adapt system characteristics. The Hearing Officer found that there was insufficient support for this interpretation of the claims and that the contributions related to the management of resources in a customer contact centre. He applied the AT&T signposts and found that all four applications related to a program for a computer and a method for doing business as such. All of the applications were refused.

Full decision O/0370/24 607Kb