Humans may engage in human-to-computer dialogs with interactive software applications referred to herein as “automated assistants” (also referred to as “digital agents,” “chatbots,” “interactive personal assistants,” “intelligent personal assistants,” “conversational agents,” etc.). For example, humans (which when they interact with automated assistants may be referred to as “users”) may provide commands and/or requests using (i) spoken natural language input (i.e. utterances), which may in some cases be converted into text and then processed, and/or (ii) by providing textual (e.g., typed) natural language input. Typically, in order for an automated assistant application to generate a desired response on behalf of a user, the user and the automated assistant application must correspond over multiple interactions. For instance, a user can provide, to an automated assistant application, a spoken input that describes content of a responsive message to be transmitted by the automated assistant application to a contact. Prior to transmitting the responsive message, the automated assistant may reiterate the received input from the user to ensure the accuracy of the received input. When such interactions take place while the user is engaged in an activity, such as driving a vehicle, the user can become distracted, thereby creating a dangerous situation for the user. Additionally, requiring an automated assistant application to undertake multiple interactions with a user in order to accomplish a task can waste computational resources at a computing device that hosts the automated assistant application, waste computational resources at other device(s) that supports the functionality of the automated assistant application, and/or waste network resources (e.g., at a client device(s) and/or a network device(s)) consumed in transmission of data (e.g., audio data) related to the multiple interactions.
Some automated assistants can additionally and/or alternatively provide various notifications to a user, and typically provide such notifications upon receipt. The notifications can include, for example, notifications from a device that is separate from a device executing an automated assistant application, notifications from applications that are separate from the automated assistant, and/or notifications from an operating system of the device executing the automated assistant application. However, a user may ignore the notifications, not comprehend the notifications, and/or otherwise not address the notifications, at least at the time of receipt. As a result, the user may need to interact with the automated assistant (and/or other applications) at a later time in order to address any previously presented notifications that were not addressed by the user at the time of receipt. This can lead to computational resource and/or network inefficiencies, as the notifications are ignored upon initial provision, and must be provided again following the initial provision.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds