2021 was a very productive year for us at IPRally. It started with our funding round, and as our team grew we were able to implement many of the ideas we had and start developing the functions our users most frequently requested. While a lot happens under the hood to improve our artificial intelligence, there are also a bunch of new functionalities directly visible in the app. In this article, we’ll showcase three of them. We will also give you a glimpse of our ambitious plans for 2022, so let’s get started!

Global patent image data 

In many fields of technology search, an abstract image alone is not enough to quickly decide if a patent document deserves further attention. For that reason, at the beginning of the year we added the Image mosaics to the result list:

And for those who like separate windows for work, there is now the function “Open images in new window” which lets you quickly switch between documents while enjoying the mosaics in whatever size and screen you need:

Legal status & events

Further, for many types of patent search work the legal status of a document is crucial. We decided to offer the data we received from our provider on a traffic-light system symbolising the simplified status as green “Active”, orange for “Unknown” and grey for “Inactive” The reason to choose orange was to attract attention to the status which we couldn’t easily determine from our sources. The expansion of our data coverage is work in progress.

In addition, there is now information about both a patent family and a family member. These are communicated through a square for a family and a circle for a single document. Hovering over them or pressing reveals a popup with additional information. And you can also get the legal events data through pressing the legal status label from the popup.

Collections - the long-term storage of your results

Collections are the place for longer-term storage of documents and combining publications from different sources, both IPRally and external. What does it mean in practice?

Let’s say, I have done two different searches regarding a snow thrower, one with free text and one with a publication number and I want to save all the results in one place to review them later. I create a collection from the starting page and add documents as following:

I can also use this modal to compare the results with a list of publications I found somewhere else. For that, I copy the publication numbers and use the second option, “List”. From a different search, I know there are ten important hits and I want to see if they are already in my IPRally list:

Voilá, all the ten hits were found in the collection. Similarly, I can also use the last option “Files” and upload an Excel file. IPRally will detect the titles of the columns and add the publication numbers. Easy-peasy :)

Five improvements to look out for in the early 2022

In order to improve the search workflow, we will launch possibilities to comment hits, show part names in the images through OCR, and export results as Excel including the abstract images. The next big feature for IPRally will be the collaborative functionality - sharing search cases and collections with the other IPRally users within your company will be possible very soon. Also, we work on improving the AI’s understanding of chemistry. Last but not least, very soon you’ll see a major upgrade of our database - with 20 new jurisdictions and almost 30 million new documents. This will increase our coverage to 46 countries and about 110 million documents. And these are our plans only for the beginning of the year! Stay tuned!