Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Timothy L Bui

Peter Xiu Deng

Ray Sun

Robert Paul St Pierre

Aaron Samuel Filner

Michael Burt Goulding

Andrew Haon

Jeremiah T Whitaker

Anil Dhawan

Jason S Hamilton

Shirlene Lim

Li-Kai Chang

Kelly Gachet

Genevieve Gambardella

Juan Jose Mejia

Navneet Mehta

Kelly Ann Grantham Gachet

J Spencer King

Timothy M Thairu

The innovation supports the ability to map alpha characters entered directly into the dialer application of a smartphone. These alpha characters can be entered via a smartphone keyboard (e.g., QWERTY keyboard) and converted to the appropriate digits as mapped to a conventional telephone keypad. The resultant numerical digits can be used to prompt a network call. Additionally, the innovation can be used during an active call to respond to prompts that traditionally require 12-key mappings. This innovation allows a user to both dial a number directly via a smartphone keyboard, and filter contacts by name, in a non-modal manner.

Alpha character support and translation in dialer

Disclosed herein are technologies that allow users to create, issue, accept and participate in gaming challenges. A gaming challenge involves participants playing a gaming application to improve their rank on a leaderboard associated with the application until challenge conditions are met or the challenge expires. Challenges can be time-based, objective-based, a tournament or of other type. A challenger can create a challenge by specifying a gaming application to be played, the leaderboard to be used in the challenge, challenge type, challenge duration, and additional challenge criteria. A gaming service can maintain the leaderboard and pass challenge-related notifications between participants. Participants' computing devices can send notices indicating when a challenge has been met or when a participant's relative ranking has changed. A challenger or challengee can select an avatar expression for animating an avatar when a challenge request or acceptance or decline of a challenge is presented at a computing device.

Gaming challenges which use leaderboards that rank challenge participants

Keyboard entries by users are tracked and filtered to reduce ambiguity in translating the entries to characters and predicting text based on the entries in a multiple keyboard environment. Key tables such as an equivalence table mapping characters to a base character value, a digit mapping table mapping characters to a digit between 0 and 9 are used to determine possible matches in text prediction. A letter accumulator UI is employed along with a number accumulator UI to provide users feedback on tracked letters.

Smart filtering with multiple simultaneous keyboard inputs

Growing community of inventors

Bothell, WA, United States of America

Timothy L Bui