In the today's busy lifestyle, the role of electronic communication is becoming more and more important. The volume of email communications has exceeded the extent of telephone usage within corporations. Furthermore, instant messaging, as a form of electronic communication, has begun to expand during recent years. Initially, instant messaging was a tool used mainly in the chat rooms and for entertainment purposes, but now its applications are being extended to internal communications of corporations. Instant messaging has all of the advantages of email messaging compared to using the phone service, while not having many of its disadvantages of the email communication, namely its offline nature. It is also less intrusive than phone service. It can easily be recorded and archived, and storing such an archive does not require a large memory space.
Instant messaging technique, to be used as a serious method of communication, however, needs to be improved. For instance, in a chat session amongst users of an instant messaging application, it is quite common to misspell or forget words when exchanging messages with other users. Currently, the only known solutions are: (1) to ignore the problem and assume the other user understands what you meant; (2) to type another message explaining what words were initially misspelled, forgot, or added; or (3) to turn on the spell check option. The drawbacks to these solutions are that it takes extra time to re-write what is meant to say in the first place, or to explain where a mistake was made. In addition, the spell checker option can help with misspelled words, but it does not help if a user forgets words or adds extra words. Then, the chat partner receiving the corrections must go back, re-read the previous message, and add the corrections. One of the embodiments of this invention will solve this problem by making it easy and convenient for both users to understand the mistake and the correction.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds