VMware’s been getting busy down at the patent office lately. Just a couple of weeks after the virtualization giant filed a claim over instant messaging between server and user, news of a second patent that lets those messaging tools access your calendar and Google data has emerged.

VMware’s new patent, called the ‘Intelligent Chat System‘, is aimed at building a smart chat bot that’s capable of “automatically obtaining, from a data source external with respect to the chat application, additional information based on the monitored content”.

According to the patent, the chat bot might be able to butt into people’s conversations and offer some ‘helpful’ suggestions. For instance, if two people are chatting about lunch, it might pop up and browse through Google and/or Yelp to find nearby restaurants, inserting these into the conversation. It also talks about looking at people’s calendars to see if they’re free to meet for lunch.

If that all sounds a bit creepy, you’ll be delighted to know it gets even more invasive. Say, for example, you’re having a chat with someone and inquire about a certain kind of product. The chat bot “can monitor the conversation, observe the product name, and then automatically pull out information associated with the product.”

Aside from this patent, VMware’s gone for another chatty patent called “Method and System for Automatic Switching Between Chat Windows”. This particular application refers to a system that monitors people’s chats and switches between windows based on the content it reads in your conversations.

All very intriguing, but what’s unclear is why VMware is so interested in chat all of a sudden. The patents were first spotted by The Register, which muses that it might be trying to build some kind of support chatbot that’s able to diagnose when your server is sick, dig up the relevant articles so you can work out what’s happened and how to fix it, and then automatically open a new chat window to inform you.

Presumably, while your reading up on how to fix the server, the chatbot can then get busy organizing your lunch date.

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