https://patents.google.com/patent/US11983746B2/en
Just got to know few days ago that our patent application was granted! 🎉
This made me reminisce about this project and the team.
In 2019, when I was at Helpshift, our VPE Amit Choudhary came up with a new idea (after a few customer conversations) and under his guidance, I (as an EM) quickly gathered the team to dive into this “Smart Intents” idea. The goal was to change the mechanism of doing ticket routing on the server side to doing ticket classification on the client side by providing a real-time feedback UX to the end user.
I paired with our data scientists (hi Christian, Yash, Shyam!) on the topic modeling to create the intents and took on the end-to-end prototyping of downloading the weights to the client-side and rendering it next to the chat input box.
Some of which is described in the diagram in the patent application:
I remember quickly buiding a terminal UI prototype using asciimatics (2019):
And then later building a UI prototype using Django to demonstrate both the backend admin & frontend of how this would work (2019):
Funny how we’re now all about bots & agents in the new world of Generative AI 😄
It took a broader team effort to take this into production and last I heard, one of the first adopters was a big gaming company.
So proud of this one, kudos to our special team that we had both innovation & commercial success 👏🏽
Thank you Amit for the idea and the permission for the team to go ahead and build!
Thank you Christian, Yash and Shyam for the data science expertise and tolerating all my dumb questions in those days 😄
And I never imagined that this idea was patentable, the credit for recognizing that goes to AT 🫡, thanks AT!
P.S. The reason I have marked the title as Helpshift, is because we have filed for a patent at DoorDash too, thanks to the genius of Qiyun Pan, hope to write a similar update in 3 years 😄.