Disclaimer: 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• What is it?
• How to use it? 
  • Tips for Asking Sophia   
  • Smart Player Detection   
• Conversation Example
• Sophia History
• View your query

What is it?

Sophia is an AI chat bot assistant, trained to take your Natural Language questions and turn them into a Boolean Search Query. It allows you to chat like ChatGPT (terms & conditions) to create a query. Its sole purpose is to help you build a Boolean query to find the most relevant documents (Patents and NPL). The aim is not to be exhaustive but focused. 

How to use it? 

Select Ask Sophia on the homepage and type a question into the search bar, you can ask in any language, but Sophia will respond in English, and it can handle misspellings.

Click on the blue button on the right side of the search bar to run the search.

Sophia will automatically suggest synonyms, IPC classes, and more. 

Sophia will also display the number of data brought back by the search.

Click on Explore to display the search results.

You can also refine your search step-by-step by asking to: 

• Add or remove keywords or IPC classes 
• Add geographic limits (countries or regions) 
• Set time ranges 
• Focus on specific players (companies or institutions)

For patents, Sophia searches within titles, abstracts, claims, object of invention and advantages. 

For NPL, Sophia searches within titles, abstracts, and keywords (both lemmatized and raw). It automatically includes singular and plural forms.   

For a new conversation, click the New Chat button.

Tips for Asking Sophia   

You can interact with Sophia naturally. Try prompts like: 

· Trends : "What are the trends in the field of…" 

· Geographical Focus: " Focus on US market ; Focus on Asian region" 

· Time Range: "Find documents published after 2020…" 

· Player focus: " Companies focus : Samsung " 

· Undo : "Remove last geographical filter" 

Doing an FTO (Freedom to Operate) search? Just mention it — Sophia will focus on claims and alive patents.   -> Note: No filter is applied to NPL in this case. 

If you are not familiar with a search topic, you can use Sophia bot in the General search to generate background information related to a topic (i.e. applications) : it can help you to focus your search using Sophia.

Smart Player Detection   

Mentioning a company or assignee name? Sophia will automatically try to apply a player filter 

• If the name is found in both patent and NPL databases, the filter applies to both. 
• If found only in patents, it applies to patents only. 
• If the name is not found, no filter is applied.   

This helps improve precision without excluding relevant non-patent literature. 

What will not work: Unknown fields, vague queries, questions impossible to answer in a Boolean query, or not related to patents.

Examples:

• Find patents from best companies. (too vague)
• Are WIPO patents any good? (not related to querying for patents)
• How many patents are from China? (numerical issues are not handled)
• I want a recipe for ratatouille! (unrelated to patents)

Challenges:

Asking several times the same question provides slightly different answers. This is a phenomenon common to AI systems.

Conversation Example

Question 1 

What are the scientific and technological trends in the field of humanoid robots? 

Answer 

25 937 Inventions | 72 958 scientific works | 515 projects | 408 clinical studies 

Interpretation 

· Synonyms for Humanoid Robots: Android, Bipedal Robot, Human-like Robot, Anthropomorphic Robot. 

· IPC Classes: 

· B25J: Manipulators; Chambers provided with manipulators. 

· G05B: Control or regulating systems in general; Functional elements of such systems; Monitoring or testing arrangements for such systems or elements. 

· G05D: Systems for controlling or regulating non-electric variables. 

· G06F: Electric digital data processing. 

 Query created 

((humanoid 3W robot) OR android OR (human-like 3W robot) OR (anthropomorphic 3W robot) OR (bipedal 3W robot) OR (human-mimicking 3W robot))/TI/AB/CLMS/SA AND (B25J OR G05B OR G06F OR G06N OR G05D)/IPC 

Question 2 

Focus on the US market and documents published after 2020 

Answer 

948 Inventions | 1144 scientific works | 173 projects | 69 clinical studies 

Interpretation 

· Synonyms for Humanoid Robots: Android, Bipedal Robot, Human-like Robot, Anthropomorphic Robot. 

· IPC Classes: 

· B25J: Manipulators; Chambers provided with manipulators. 

· G05B: Control or regulating systems in general; Functional elements of such systems; Monitoring or testing arrangements for such systems or elements. 

· G05D: Systems for controlling or regulating non-electric variables. 

· G06F: Electric digital data processing. 

· Search Focus: US market and documents published after 2020. 

Query created 

((humanoid 3W robot) OR android OR (human-like 3W robot) OR (anthropomorphic 3W robot) OR (bipedal 3W robot) OR (human-mimicking 3W robot))/TI/AB/CLMS/SA AND (B25J OR G05B OR G06F OR G06N OR G05D)/IPC AND (US)/PN AND (EPD=2020-01-01:2025-04-24) 

Sophia History

You can access the Sophia Search history using the icon on the top right corner of Insight.

Each item is clickable so you can display the search strategy.

Actions (open, run, rename, delete item) can be run on each item using the 3dot button:

View your query

Put your mouse over the search bar to display the search query.

Clicking on the search bar will display a window containing your query and allowing you to access to Sophia, using the Open Chat button.