Microsoft's published patents in the past few weeks highlight several various interesting ideas the company may have for the future, including a stylus that can turn into and earpiece, live picture overlays for Mixed reality systems, and more.
Now, the company has been granted a patent that describes a hybrid intelligence approach to deal with inline notes. In its essence, the detailed mechanism aims to make content collaboration a much more streamlined process.
Microsoft has stated that although there exist applications that allow for collaborative content creation, such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs, dealing with inline notes left by someone can become a tedious process, hindering the progress of the actual task at hand.
For this reason, the tech giant has patented a hybrid intelligence mechanism that evokes intelligence support that may comprise of a bot framework, to address inline notes. The described system would allow for responses to not only be inserted without access to to documents, but also be directed toward specific agents through trigger terms such as "@<agent>: request", or more common phrases like "find out", "double check this", and more.
Various communication applications can be employed to facilitate the displaying of notes to an appropriate client, who can then use interaction fields to quickly insert their response. Furthermore, people who have been specifically requested to respond will also be allowed to spread the question to others, provided they are unable to answer. The aforementioned mechanism inherently implies a much wider range of collaboration to be allowed to take place since only the relevant content is displayed to the contacted person.
Plenty of other ways of communication and subsequent editing can be read in detail in the patent documentation. In any case, if the technique is implemented in collaborative applications by Microsoft in the future, it might perhaps prove to be a rather useful feature for many,
