USPTO Patent Grant: Identifying Trending Topics in Customer Inquiries

ChangeBridge: Patent Grants - Business Methods (G06Q)

Published March 24th, 2026

Detected March 25th, 2026

Summary

The USPTO has granted Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC a patent (US12586080B2) for a system and method to identify trending topics in customer inquiries. The patented technology involves analyzing customer data to detect trending keywords, cluster them into topics, and rank these topics based on inquiry volume and keyword weights.

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What changed

This document details a newly granted patent (US12586080B2) by the USPTO to Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC. The patent covers a method and system designed to identify trending topics within customer inquiries. The technology works by analyzing customer inquiries from various sources, comparing keywords across different time windows to detect trends, and then clustering and ranking these trends based on their prevalence and associated inquiry weights. The patent includes 20 claims and was filed on August 14, 2023.

As this is a patent grant, it does not impose new regulatory obligations on businesses. However, companies involved in customer service, data analytics, or technology development may find the patented methods relevant for their own innovation or competitive analysis. The patent is publicly available information and does not require any specific compliance actions from regulated entities.

Source document (simplified)

← USPTO Patent Grants

Method and system for identifying trending topics in customer inquiries

Grant US12586080B2 Kind: B2 Mar 24, 2026

Assignee

Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Inventors

Xinhui Ge, Veeravenkata Satya Sridhar Maddipati, Venkatasatya Premnath Ayyalasomayajula, Nikhil Verma, Mara Saveliev, John Theodore Nassif

Abstract

A system and method for detecting trending topics in customer inquiries includes retrieving customer inquiries from a plurality of data sources for a target time window and reference time windows and detecting trending keywords in the target time window as compared to keywords in the reference time windows. Responsive to detecting the trending keywords, customer inquiries in the target time window that include one or more of the trending keywords are collected and a weight is measured for each collected customer inquiry based on weights of detected trending keywords in each collected customer inquiry. A connection graph is generated for the detected trending keywords and the collected customer inquiries. The detected trending keywords are then clustered into a plurality of trending topics based on the connection graph, and the trending topics are ranked based on the measured weights of the collected customer inquiries associated with each trending topic.