In recent months, several interesting patents filed by Microsoft have been published. These include a dynamic UAV delivery system, a bandwidth-conserving browser plug-in, an artificial speech-generating device, and more.
Now, a different piece of tech that may not pique everyone"s interest has been patented by the Redmond giant. The patent in question revolves around an automated travel diary generation system, which identifies trips made by its users and forms coherent paragraphs describing these travels.
For those who are unaware, a travel diary is a journal that is used to summarize various encounters and experiences that may befall travelers during their journeys. Microsoft believes that in its current state, maintaining a travel journal can be a tedious task - one that may lead to events not being properly recounted due to people"s imperfect writing or memorization skills. This is the sort of situation where the company feels an automated travel diary generation system can come in handy.
The system could include a trip content generator that is configured to describe trips made by users based on their personalized writing styles. Not only will the generated sentences form coherent paragraphs automatically, they could also be combined with visual content, such as images, videos, and emojis, providing an interactive graphical user interface (GUI). The GUI could enable users to view, update, and modify the generated content to their liking, while system models may also be retrained based upon user feedback. This sort of travel diary may be implemented through hardware, software, or both.
The content generation system may also comprise a content mining engine or a trip identification engine that may be operated to receive signals from a variety of sources to identify visits and trips. These signals may then be routed to client or server computing devices depending on their types. Notably, the visits or trips may not necessarily be limited vacations, but could also be extended to include work-related and social events.
Interestingly, the system could incorporate digital assistant functionality from a standalone application, or one that is part of the client computing device. As such, it may be configured to accept various forms of input from the user, including voice commands and the like. Upon reception of the input, the personal assistant could offer numerous services such as answering queries, providing directions, locating nearest restaurants, and other travel-related utilities.
The various aspects and functionalities described in this patent are not limited to a single type of device, but instead, they may operate through desktop computer systems, wired and wireless computing systems, mobile computing systems, hand-held devices, multiprocessor systems, microprocessor-based or programmable consumer electronics, minicomputers, and mainframe computers. The travel diaries generated upon conjunctional or detached working of any of the described implementations could then be shared with other users.
Although an automated travel diary may sound like a quite intriguing concept to avid travelers, do note that there is no guarantee Microsoft is working on, or plans to work on it, and the patent merely grants the company legal rights over the proposed design.