Patent ID: 7698244

Claim:
A method for providing an electronic butler for providing application services to a user, comprising: determining a context for the electronic butler, wherein the determined context includes at least an urgency level and an indication of a condition internal to the electronic butler, wherein the indication of a condition internal to the electronic butler is selected from a group consisting of an internal flag, mode, alert, and alarm, and indicates a low resources, security alert, safe mode, local failure, slow connection, or wait state condition; receiving an input; obtaining data associated with the received input from a database associated with the butler; determining a need based on the obtained data and the context; initiating provisioning of the determined need; obtaining additional input from the user; determining a further need based on the additional input, the obtained data and/or the context; initiating provisioning of the determined further need; and providing output to the user based on the input and/or provisioning of the determined need, wherein the urgency level comprises a low level corresponding to receiving the input a first time and an elevated level corresponding to receiving the input an additional time before obtaining additional input from the user, and wherein receiving an input comprises obtaining information regarding a scheduled future event and wherein initiating provisioning of the determined need comprises initiating provision of the determined need at a time based on the obtained information regarding the scheduled future event.