Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie

Dharma Kiritkumar Shukla

Israel Hilerio

Aditya G Bhandarkar

Matthew S Augustine

Abhay Vinayak Parasnis

Farookh P Mohammed

Raymond Edward Endres

Michael James Ott

Alexander M Tkatch

Shivaram Prabhakar

Kruthika Ponnusamy

Matthew J Burdick

Ashish Mehta

Wei Xiong

Sriram Srinivasan

Bin Wang

Senthil Kumar Velayutham

Michaeljon Miller

Kevin Whittenberger

Hari Krishnan

Samarth Gupta

Ross Garrett Cutler

Raymond Edward Ozzie

Ming Gang Liu

Jack E Ozzie

David Robert Shutt

George P Moromisato

Raman Narayanan

Ori Amiga

Jian Wu

Nicholas David Burton

Akezyt Janedittakarn

Qi Liu

Hari Krishnan S

Prasad Thiruveedu

Xinguang Albert Chen

Youg Lu

Mohammad Mushtaque Silat

Shri Vidhya Alagesan

Raymond Enders

Rama Krishna Prasad Satya Prakash

Senthil K Velayutham

Techniques for providing unified user interfaces among actively paired devices, including that first and second devices are actively paired together at a first time based on a determination that the first device is in physical proximity to the second device when the first and second devices are both authenticated for a same user service account; receiving, at the first time, an indication of an actuation of a first user interface control associated with a teleconferencing session and presented by the first device; and causing, in response the receipt of the indication and the determination that the first and second devices are actively paired together at the first time, a real-time component of the teleconferencing session to be rendered by the second device while a first user associated with the user service account is joined to the teleconferencing session as a participant.

Teleconferencing interfaces and controls for paired user computing devices

Techniques for prioritization of data streams include transmitting a plurality of data streams to a first device over a network where each data stream is configured to cause the first device to perform a specific function, dynamically detecting a bandwidth limitation limiting an amount of available bandwidth for transmitting the plurality of data streams, dynamically determining bandwidth reduction criteria by identifying a first subset of the plurality of data streams to stop transmitting based on the specific function that each respective data stream causes the first device to perform, temporarily stopping transmitting of the first subset of data streams configured to cause the first device to perform a first set of functions, and continuing to transmit a second subset of data streams not included in the first subset of the data streams to the first device to cause the first device to continue to perform a second set of functions.

Throttling and prioritization of multiple data streams

A server allows pairing of a computing device with a companion computing device so that they may automatically connect to one another in the future. Pairing is accomplished by responding to a user request to pair a particular companion device by identifying computing devices associated with a particular user account, and directing those devices to monitor whether they are in range of a proximity signal (such as a BLUETOOTH&#xae; signal). A user interface on the companion device displays a list of devices specific to the user that are in proximity to the companion computing device, so that the user can choose a device to pair with the companion computing device.

Proximity-based pairing and operation of user-specific companion devices

A system and method for selecting a target device out of a larger group of candidate devices for rendering a response from a virtual assistant to an end-user is disclosed. The system determines that a same trigger phrase included in an utterance has been received by multiple devices that are in proximity to one another at around the same time. These candidate devices can collect attention data, such as user gaze toward a device, to select the device that was most likely the intended recipient of the utterance. The system is configured to control the virtual assistant to render a response solely via the selected device.

Selective response rendering for virtual assistants

Techniques for providing unified user interfaces among actively paired devices, including determining that first and second devices are actively paired together at a first time based on a determination that the first device is in physical proximity to the second device when the first and second devices are both authenticated for a same user service account; receiving, at the first time, an indication of an actuation of a user interface control associated with a user activity and presented by the first device; and causing, in response to the receipt of the indication and the determination that the first and second devices are actively paired together at the first time, the second device to present a user interface associated with the user activity.

Unified interfaces for paired user computing devices

Disclosed in some examples are devices, systems, methods, and machine-readable mediums which provide for a network-based communication service that allows users in a network-based communication session to subscribe to video streams of the communication session that are of interest by subscribing to content features of those video streams rather than the video streams themselves. Content features may be any object in the video stream that is recognized by applying an image processing algorithm to one or more video frames. Example content features may include recognized users and/or other recognized objects.

Content feature based video stream subscriptions

Techniques for conducting a communication session include receiving, from a first device and in connection with a communication session, an indication of a bandwidth limitation on transferring data associated with the communication session, the first device being configured to generate a plurality of data streams associated with the communication session and to transmit the plurality of data streams to a second device; dynamically determining one or more operating parameters of the first device to reduce the amount of bandwidth required to transmit the plurality of data streams by eliminating one or more data streams, reducing an amount of bandwidth required by one or more data streams, or both based on bandwidth reduction criteria determined by the first device, the second device, or both; and directing the first device to transmit the plurality of data streams to the second device according to the one or more operating parameters.

Throttling and prioritization for multichannel audio and/or multiple data streams for conferencing

An application host (such as a web application server) may execute a set of applications on behalf of a set of users. Such applications may not be fully trusted, and a two-way isolation of the distributed resources of an application (e.g., the executing application, the application user interface on the user's computer, and server- and client-side stored resources) from other applications may be desirable. This isolation may be promoted utilizing the cross-domain restriction policies of each user's computer by allocating a distinct subdomain of the application host for each application. The routing of network requests to a large number of distinct subdomains may be economized by mapping all distinct subdomains to the address of the domain of the application host. Moreover, the application user interfaces may be embedded in an isolation construct (e.g., an IFRAME HTML element) to promote two-way isolation among application user interfaces and client-side application resources.

Hosted application sandbox model

A computer user may use a computing environment comprising a set of computers that respectively feature a web browser having a browser cache containing many types of data objects, including application resources and user-generated data files. However, the contents of a browser cache significantly contribute to the computing environment of a computer, and the computing environments presented by each computer may diverge, providing an inconsistent computing environment. Instead, the contents of browser caches of the computers comprising the computing environment may be synchronized across computers. Additionally, the browser cache may be synchronized with the other data objects of a computing environment (such as relevant portions of the filesystem); the synchronizing may be implemented as an out-of-browser process executing independently of the applications, and even when the browser is not executing; and the synchronization may be exposed through a programmatic access with which web applications may interact.

Programming model for synchronizing browser caches across devices and web services

An application executing in a virtual environment, such as a web browser, may be serviced by an application host, such as a webserver that maintains application resources or provides runtime services to the application. However, it may be difficult to configure the application to operate suitably when the application host is unavailable. Techniques for facilitating such operation include the storing of application resources in a computing environment (such as the local file system or a deployable mesh or cloud environment) while also initiating the application within the virtual environment in the context of the application host, which may reduce difficulties with isolation policies imposed by the virtual environment (e.g., cross-domain restrictions imposed by the web browser.) This configuration may promote the servicing of the application alongside other applications and data objects, e.g., the automated deployment and synchronization of the application among all devices comprising the user's mesh environment.

Programming model for installing and distributing occasionally connected applications

Systems and methods for implementing online and offline applications are described. Such systems and methods may in some cases provide the same programming interface, regardless of whether the application is online or offline. Such systems and methods may also or instead in some cases provide additional or other possible capabilities, including installation without elevated privileges, simplified data synchronization, sharing of applications and application data, access to data from other applications, and richer client functionality than may be provided by an application such as a web browser.

Running applications in an online or offline mode based on the availability of the connection to the remote web server

Portions of a computing environment (such as a user's mesh) may restrict accessing to particular types of access by particular applications. The computer may support applications executing within a virtual environment (such as a web browser) by brokering such access through a token-based system. When an application requests a particular type of access (e.g., writing to a particular data object), the computer may contact an authorization server with the credentials of the application to request the specified access, and may receive and store an authorization token. The computer may then access the computing environment with the authorization token, and may return the results to the application within the virtual environment. Additional features may further support such applications; e.g., a programmatic interface may be provided in a familiar language, such as JavaScript, whereby applications can request access to particular data objects and identify authorized access capabilities.

Data access programming model for occasionally connected applications

Applications executing on computer systems may execute in a virtual environment, such as a web application executing in a web browser. An application may access the actual computing environment (such as the filesystem), but this accessing may be complicated; e.g., the computing environment may be deployed across many computers and devices, and may be synchronized for offline access via a local cache. A computing environment component may service the complex computing environment (e.g., by managing the cache and retrieving remotely stored data objects) and expose it as a well-organized set of data objects. A virtual environment interface (e.g., a web browser plug-in) may allow applications hosted in the virtual environment to access the computing environment through the computing environment component. Programmatic interfaces may also be implemented to permit such accessing via familiar programming languages and techniques, such as JavaScript libraries exposed to web applications in the web browser.

Programming model for application and data access and synchronization within virtual environments

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Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie