Obviousness

The provided patent document US8015006B2, titled "Systems and methods for processing natural language speech utterances with context-specific domain agents," includes a "BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION" section that describes the state of the art and its deficiencies, as well as "Prior art keywords" (utterance, user, context, request, information) and a "Prior art date" (2002-06-03). However, the document does not list specific prior art patent or publication references by number or name within these sections that can be combined for an obviousness analysis under 35 U.S.C. § 103.

Therefore, I cannot identify combinations of specific prior art references that would render the claims of US8015006 obvious, nor can I explain the motivation to combine them, as no such references are provided in the designated "Prior Art section" of the document.

The "BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION" generally describes the following limitations in the prior art:

• Difficulty for machines to communicate with humans in a natural manner, due to human reliance on context and domain knowledge, versus structured machine-based queries.
• Fundamental incompatibility between human questions and machine processing of queries.
• Existing natural language processing and speech recognition systems, despite improvements, were "generally unable to provide a complete environment for users to make natural language speech queries and receive natural sounding responses."
• Significant barriers remained to creating a complete natural language speech-based query and response environment.

To conduct an obviousness analysis as requested, specific prior art documents, along with their disclosed features, would need to be identified. With such references, one could then assess whether the claims of US8015006 (which are generally described in the "SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION" and "DETAILED DESCRIPTION") would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) by combining the teachings of those specific references, and whether there would have been a motivation to do so. Without these specific references, a detailed obviousness analysis cannot be performed.