Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Discount or incentive
Reexamination Certificate
1999-12-29
2004-11-30
Hapiz, Tario R. (Department: 3623)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Discount or incentive
C345S215000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06826540
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to electronic information gathering, and more particularly to the use of a virtual human interface to conduct surveys and collect and present survey results data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Marketing and planning of all sorts is often critically dependent on customer and/or public feedback. In the context of product planning, such information can avoid the devastating effect of introducing a product the public simply does not want, is not ready for, or even a product the public finds offensive. In another context, media producers, such as those producing television series, are constantly wary of the effect on the consuming public that might be created by particular plots, changes in plots or treatment of certain issues, roles or characters. In addition, producers need to be aware of viewer preferences for use in attracting advertising. In these and other areas, accurate and timely consumer feedback is critical.
Existing techniques for obtaining satisfactory feedback and formatting it for useful and meaningful review are extremely costly. That is because they typically require employing small armies of telemarketers, data entry clerks, interviewers, statisticians and/or other data collection teams, and still others to convert, format and make sense of the information collected.
Another problem with information gathering is the attention, concentration and understanding of the participants. For example, feedback received from survey participants may be unreliable, inaccurate or unhelpful if survey participants lose interest or become distracted while taking the survey. Survey participants soon become bored with survey questions, particularly when presented in large quantities, in printed form, or unclear or tedious language, and provide abrupt, confusing, careless and/or ill-considered feedback when required to respond.
Some methods of keeping participants interested involve extrinsic motivation, such as payment. Providing extrinsic motivation is often unsatisfactory, however, because the participant is still not genuinely interested in the survey. For that, intrinsic motivation is needed. It is known that human interviewers presenting live questions can sometimes create intrinsic motivation and can maintain a participant's focus and concentration for a longer period of time. The interaction itself provides the intrinsic motivational component needed. However, not only is it extremely expensive to pay and train live interviewers, but also live human interviewers themselves can become bored when asking the same questions over and over again and repetitively logging participants' answers. When this happens, live interviewers lose their effectiveness in holding the attention of participants.
Moreover, survey sponsors can rarely rely on the relevant consumers—even by enticing them with free gifts or cash payments—to travel to the survey sponsor or any other location to take a survey. Therefore, the work is typically done in focus groups, through door-to-door canvassing, through the use of paid diaries delivered by mail or through telephone surveys. Consumers simply require utmost convenience to themselves in providing survey information. Thus, survey sponsors must also overcome the problem of survey delivery—that is, ensuring that the questions are made available at a location sufficiently convenient to participants. Extensive and expensive planning involving demographics and geographical regions is typically conducted, leading afterward to the dispatching of teams to varied locations, often nationwide.
Still another problem with traditional survey techniques relates to the long delay between the gathering of information and the conversion of the information into a form useful to the survey sponsors. Traditional data collection, data entry and tabulating processes commonly require labor intensive and error fraught keyboarding of data from survey forms. Entities conducting surveys often have to wait for results to be returned by mail before they can even begin to be processed.
What is needed is a system for gathering information from consumers which will hold the consumers' interest and avoid distraction, which will minimize the time and expense of gathering the information and making it useful and which will maximize convenience to consumers.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
One embodiment of the invention is a survey system, which comprises (1) a computer comprising (a) a computer readable medium; (b) a processor; and (c) a display; (2) a script comprising question data representing a question, the script stored in the computer readable medium; (3) character image data representing a character communicating information, the character image data stored in the computer readable medium; and (4) a user interface running on the processor, the user interface configured to access the script, the user interface configured to process the question data to communicate the question to a user, an image generator of the user interface configured to process the character image data to create a representation of the character on the display during the communication of the question, the user interface configured to receive and process response data representing a response provided by the user, the user interface configured to store in the computer readable medium answer data representing the response provided by the user. One aspect of the system further comprises (1) response pattern data representing a portion of a possible user response to the question; and (2) lobbying data representing lobbying information to persuade the user to respond to the question by providing a response that does not include the at least one portion of the response to the question, the user interface configured to compare the response data to the response pattern data to determine whether the response provided by the user includes the predetermined portion of a possible response and, if so, to process the lobbying data to communicate the lobbying information to the user without storing the answer data. That aspect may preferably further comprise expression data representing an expression of the character, the user interface configured to process the expression data to cause the image generator to process the character image data to change an expression of the representation of the character on the display during the communication of the lobbying information. In another aspect, the system further comprises (1) response pattern data representing a portion of a possible user response to the question; and (2) advertising data representing advertising information to inform the user about goods or services, the user interface configured to compare the response data to the response pattern data to determine whether the response provided by the user includes the predetermined portion of a possible response and, if so, to process the advertising data to communicate the advertising information to the user. In still another aspect, the system further comprises (1) response pattern data representing a portion of a possible user response to the question; and (2) entertainment data representing an offer of an incentive or reward to the user for answering the question, the user interface configured to compare the response data to the response pattern data to determine whether the response provided by the user includes the predetermined portion of a possible response and, if so, to process the entertainment data to communicate or present the offer to the user. In yet another aspect, the system further comprises (1) first response pattern data representing a portion of a first possible user response to the question; (2) second response pattern data representing a portion of a second possible user response to the question; and (3) predetermined answer data, the user interface configured to compare the response data to the first response pattern data and to compare the response data to the second response pattern data, and, if eit
Mauldin Michael L.
McBride Aaron J.
Plantec Peter M.
Romero Jeremy Shay
Colón Catherine M.
Hapiz Tario R.
Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear LLP
Virtual Personalities, Inc.
LandOfFree
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