Granted Patent B2

US 12,412,039 · App. 17/849,228 · Granted Sep 9, 2025

Inventors: Kuleen Mehta (Sammamish, WA); Matheus Camasmie Pavan (Sao Paulo, BR); Alan Thomas (Woodstock, GA)

Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

G06F40/30G06F16/3329G06F16/3344G06F40/55

Abstract

Claims (59)

1. A computer-implemented method, the method comprising:

receiving a natural language input, into an email application, for performing an action on emails received by the email application;

providing the natural language input to a trained machine learning model;

receiving, as output from the trained machine learning model, a tagged primitive and an identified action from the natural language input;

generating an automation rule for performing the action on a subset of emails previously received by the email application, the subset of emails corresponding to the tagged primitives, wherein generating the automation rule comprises:

based on the identified action, identifying a rule template from a plurality of rule templates available from the email application, the identified rule template having a predefined filter slot for the tagged primitive; and

filling the filter slot of the identified rule template with the tagged primitive; and

executing the generated automation rule to perform the action on the subset of emails.

2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

causing a display of the generated automation rule;

receiving an edit to the automation rule; and

storing the edited automation rule as a recurrent automation rule.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the tagged primitive includes an entity from the natural language input and a primitive tag.

4. The method of claim 3 , wherein the primitive tag is one of a to tag, a from tag, an invite tag, an update tag, a read tag, a flag tag, a date-span tag, or a folder tag.

5. The method of claim 1 , wherein the action is one of a move action, a flag action, a mark-as-read action, a mark-as-unread action, a delete action, or a show action.

6. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

based on a value of the tagged primitive, querying a remote database to resolve the value of the tagged primitive;

receiving a result to the query; and

wherein generating the automation rule includes using the result to the query.

7. A system for generating email automation rules, comprising:

a processor; and

memory storing instructions that, when executed by the processor, are configured to cause the system to perform operations comprising:

receive a natural language input to an email application for performing an action on emails stored by the email application;

provide the natural language input into a trained machine learning model;

receive, as output from the trained machine learning model, tagged primitives and an identified action from the natural language input;

generate an automation rule for performing the action on a subset of previously received emails received by the email application, the subset of emails corresponding to the tagged primitives, wherein generating the automation rule comprises:

based on the identified action, identifying a rule template from a plurality of rule templates, the identified rule template having one or more predefined filter slots for the tagged primitives; and

filling the filter slots of the identified rule template with the tagged primitives;

execute the generated automation rule to perform the action on the subset of emails;

store the generated automation rule as a recurring rule;

receive a new email; and

execute the recurring rule to perform the action on the new email.

8. The system of claim 7 , wherein the operations further comprise:

cause a display of the generated automation rule;

receive an edit to the automation rule; and

store the edited automation rule as a recurrent automation rule.

9. The system of claim 7 , wherein each of the tagged primitives includes an entity from the natural language input and a primitive tag.

10. The system of claim 9 , wherein the primitive tags include at least one of a topic tag, a category tag, a task tag, or an urgency tag.

11. The system of claim 7 , wherein the action is one of a move action, a flag action, a mark-as-read action, a mark-as-unread action, a delete action, or a show action.

12. The system of claim 7 , further comprising:

based on a value of at least one of the tagged primitives, querying a remote database to resolve the value of the tagged primitive;

receiving a result to the query; and

wherein generating the automation rule includes using the result to the query.

13. A computer-implemented method for generating email automation rules, the method comprising:

receiving, by an email application, a natural language input for performing an action on emails received by the email application;

providing the natural language input into a trained machine learning model;

receiving, as output from the trained machine learning model, a tagged email primitive and an identified action from the natural language input;

generating an automation rule by identifying a rule template based on the identified action and filling filter slots of the identified rule template with the tagged email primitive;

executing the generated automation rule, wherein executing the generated automation rule causes:

filtering the emails received by the email application based on the tagged primitive to generate a filtered set of emails;

performing the action on the filtered set of emails.

14. The method of claim 13 , further comprising:

based on a value of the tagged primitive, querying a remote database to resolve the value of the tagged primitive;

receiving a result to the query; and

filling one or more of the filter slots with the received result to the query to generate the automation rule.

15. The method of claim 14 , further comprising:

storing the automation rule as a recurring rule;

receiving a new email; and

based on the new email satisfying a value of the one or more filter slots, performing the action on the new email.

Assignments (1)

Continuity (1)

References Cited (16)