I spent the last year or so exploring and validating solutions to the "voice cliff" problem found in multimodal voice-controlled devices such as smart displays and TVs. That's when you are controlling some UI with your voice and suddenly you can't, because that particular screen hasn't been designed for voice. Think of Echo Show settings or literally all of Nest Hub's UI. As a result, I came up with a "big idea". So now I want to file some preliminary patent applications for some of the bits that might actually be new inventions. The chances of actually getting a patent are slim - most of the ideas I thought were brilliant were already thought up, patented, published in research papers or even productized, sometimes a decade ago or more! There are a lot of forward thinking researchers out there. And this doesn't even take into account patents which are pending. Apple could have a tranche of patents announced tomorrow which were submitted years ago. Or some startup could come out of stealth and you learn that a well funded group of people way smarter than you has been working on similar problems for years.
Anyways, actual new ideas are rare, but I seem to have a few.
Distilling a big idea into smaller pieces that can be explained in detail is a good exercise, regardless of the eventual success of any patents. So I'm churning through 100+ pages of notes, twice as many patent and paper references, and a bit of code and trying to get it into a state to share with the world. I've never been an academic, but I used to work at Nokia Research Center, so I've worked with quite a few and now I know how hard their job was.
I spent the last year or so exploring and validating solutions to the "voice cliff" problem found in multimodal voice-controlled devices such as smart displays and TVs. That's when you are controlling some UI with your voice and suddenly you can't, because that particular screen hasn't been designed for voice. Think of Echo Show settings or literally all of Nest Hub's UI. As a result, I came up with a "big idea". So now I want to file some preliminary patent applications for some of the bits that might actually be new inventions. The chances of actually getting a patent are slim - most of the ideas I thought were brilliant were already thought up, patented, published in research papers or even productized, sometimes a decade ago or more! There are a lot of forward thinking researchers out there. And this doesn't even take into account patents which are pending. Apple could have a tranche of patents announced tomorrow which were submitted years ago. Or some startup could come out of stealth and you learn that a well funded group of people way smarter than you has been working on similar problems for years.
Anyways, actual new ideas are rare, but I seem to have a few.
Distilling a big idea into smaller pieces that can be explained in detail is a good exercise, regardless of the eventual success of any patents. So I'm churning through 100+ pages of notes, twice as many patent and paper references, and a bit of code and trying to get it into a state to share with the world. I've never been an academic, but I used to work at Nokia Research Center, so I've worked with quite a few and now I know how hard their job was.