What is the Novelty Search Agent?
Novelty Search Agent carries out a full novelty search workflow end-to-end, using AI in every stage.
Instead of manually formulating queries, running searches and reviewing results, the Agent handles the entire process: it analyzes your input materials, defines a search target, extracts key features, searches for prior art, reviews the results for feature presence, evaluates relevance, and produces a full Feature chart and a Written report.
You don't need to have a clear idea what the actual invention to be searched is. The Agent helps you carve out the both the main invention, as well as embodiments thereof, from your materials. It automatically makes multiple AI searches to cover them as well as possible and presents the results in sufficient level of details to make downstream decisions.
Agent automatically creates and populates a Project, that you can then continue to work on manually, if needed.
How to access the Novelty Search Agent
To use the Novelty Search Agent, your organization admin must
ensure that your organization has the Generative AI features (see Enabling AI Assistant Features) enabled, and that you are on Unlimited plan, and
ensure that the Novelty Agent permission has been granted to your user account.
Your organization must also have an active Agent subscription or trial, or your user account must have free Agent runs left. The free quota is replenished on a monthly basis.
Once enabled, you can launch the Agent from the IPRally home page by selecting Agent mode (vs Standard mode) on the Home screen.
Launching an Agent search
To start a new Novelty Search Agent:
Select the Novelty search type from the home page sidebar.
Provide your search materials describing the invention. You can use any combination of:
Free form text input
PDF documents
MS Office documents (PPTX, DOCX, XLSX)
Image files (PNG, JPG, WEBP)
Plain text files (TXT)
Optionally, set a Publication date filter to find prior art published before a specific date.
Click Launch Agent to start the automated workflow.
The Agent will begin processing your materials and you can follow its progress in real time.
The Agent workflow
Once launched, the Agent first studies the search materials (in a way similar to the Smart search) and then executes six steps automatically. You can monitor the progress of each step as it completes.
Preparatory step: Studying the invention materials
The Agent takes text inputs as such, and studies drawings, photographs, flow charts etc using AI. You can transparently see how each file was interpreted by the AI by clicking the file thumbnail.
Then, the actual search, review and reporting process is divided into six steps:
Step 1: Search Target
Step 2: Features
Step 3: Search
Step 4: Review
Step 5: Relevance Evaluation
Step 6: Written Report
See more information on the steps below. In the user interface, they are divided into expandable accordions with detailed information on each step.
Step 1: Search Target
The Agent analyzes your input materials and generates a set of patent-style claims that define the search target. These claims represent the key aspects of the invention that the Agent will search for.
Claims format is used for several reasons:
IPRally's AI search engine has been trained using claims. They are an optimal format for accurate prior art searches.
Structured claims set allow doing multiple searches for different aspects and embodiments of the invention, based on claim combinations.
Claims are clear for the user - they are meant for defining technology and seach targets exactly.
You can view the generated claims, and, once the workflow completes, combe back to this step, edit them if needed to refine the search focus.
The Claims are referred to C1, C2, ... etc in the Feature Chart.
Step 2: Features
The Agent extracts the key distinguishing features from each generated claim. These features are the specific technical elements that will be checked against the prior art documents found during the search.
Each claim may have one or multiple features.
The Features are referred to F1, F2, ... etc in the Feature Chart and Written Report.
Step 3: Search
The Agent runs one or more automated patent searches to find the closest prior art based on the claims identified in Step 1.
Typically, the Agent makes one search per claim and one search for all claims combined, to ensure that all features and feature combinations of the invention are covered at sufficient detail.
The documents are shown in the Feature Chart and Relevant documents and Non-relevant document Tabs. Most relevant documents are referred to as D1, D2, ... in the Written Report.
Step 4: Review
The Agent reviews the discovered documents and analyzes each one for the presence of the key features extracted in Step 2. This is similar to manually checking whether a document discloses specific features of your invention.
The review step also creates reasoning forms the foundation for the in-depth content of detailed Feature Chart and Written Report. Full document- and feature-level outcomes of the review step can be viewed by clicking the cells in the Feature Chart and or viewing the Ask AI chats history of the documents.
Step 5: Relevance Evaluation
Based on the feature review, the Agent assigns a relevance score to each document:
High relevance
Medium relevance
Low relevance
Not relevant
The results summary shows how many documents fall into each relevance category.
Note: Relevance evaluation is currently based on scoring of documents over ALL features, not just those of claim 1. It is meant for overall ranking of the results.
Low relevance is not an indicator of patentability in broad scope.
High relevance is not an indicator of no patentability at all.
See details of the Feature Chart and Written Report for conclusions.
Step 6: Written Report
The Agent generates a written novelty search report summarizing the findings. The report is automatically saved in your project for easy access and sharing.
Viewing results
Once the workflow completes, you can access the results in multiple tabs next to the Agent Workflow tab:
Feature Chart tab
Feature Chart tab contains a table view of which features were found in which documents, giving you a clear overview of feature coverage across the prior art.
The Feature Chart has
A Full view and a Compact view
Claims and Features on the horizontal axis
Full texts can be seen by hoveing over them
The documents found, sorted by relevance, on the vertical axis
Clicking the document's title opens it in a new browser tab
Interactive Present/Unclear/Absent matrix
Hover on a cell: see reasoning for an individual Feature/Document pair
Click on a row: see reasoning for all Features for that Document
In both views:
Hover on a paragraph citation: see the original text of the citation
Click a paragraph citation: open the document in highlighted view
Ability to view and override the automatic Relevance evalaution
Ability to add Comments
Full view with on-hover feature-level reasoning
Compact view with side panel all-document reasoning and on-hover passage view
The Feature Chart, including full review contents and paragraph citations, is exportable in multiple formats (XLSX, PDF, DOCX) as a whole, or limited to selected documents or relevance levels.
Written Report tab
Written Report is a document summarizing both the Agent workflow and the findings. In addition, it has an AI generated analysis of Novelty and Inventive step. The generated novelty search report with the Agent's analysis and conclusions.
The Written Report is exportable in PDF and DOCX formats in its entirety.
The structure of the Written Report is the following
Executive Summary
1. The Invention
1.1. Starting materials
1.2. Target of the search
1.3. Key features
2. Search results
2.1. Summary of Results
2.2. Key feature matrix
2.3. Novelty analysis
2.4. Inventive step analysis
3. Search methodology
3.1. The IPRally method
3.2. Searches carried out
3.3. Search coverage
4. Disclaimer
Written Report with full AI analysis of findings and documentation of the Agent's workflow
Note:
The search report is automatically generated and relies heavily on
AI in all stages. No human supervision is involved. We strongly
recommend double-checking the facts before using the information.
IPRally endeavors towards maintaining high quality of the Service
and correctness of data available through the Service. However,
IPRally is not responsible for any discomfort or damage caused
to the Customer or its users by either correct or potentially
incorrect data in the Service or functioning of the Service.
Relevant document and Non-relevant Documents tabs
These tabs contain the documents evaluated as Relevant (High, Medium, Low) or Not relevant, respectively in the normal "result list format" of IPRally: Full bibliographic data, full document view, (Multi-patent) Ask AI, etc.
Tips for best results
Provide clear and detailed invention materials.
The more specific your description of the invention and the clearer the core idea of the invention is described there, the better the Agent can define the search target in a meaningful way.
Avoid materials that contain internal jargon only for key parts of the invention, without technical explanations. The AI operates based on publicly available knowledge.
However, the Agent is also capable of making sense of messy and unstructured materials - a typical invention notification is usually fine as such. Try it out without spending excessive amount of time to clean in up.
Take advantage of multiple input formats and files.
Uploading the raw invention materials, in whatever format they happen to be, is usually a good starting point.
Combining text descriptions with technical drawings or diagrams can help the Agent understand the invention more completely.
The free text field can be used for efficient guiding of the search focus. Just state there what the AI should pay most attention to, and it usually follows your instructions.
Iterate if needed.
First run the automated process and see where it takes you. Due to the detailedness and thoroughness of the analysis, it is often sufficient for the next actions.
If the search target and features are more or less correct, but the search is not deep enough or the analysis is not complete or convincing, make additional searches or
If the search target oris clearly wrong or needs adjustment, either revise the invention materials and run a new Agent, or go back to the Agent Workflow tab, edit the claims to be more focused, and re-run the "same" Agent.