Patent ID: 8819566

Claim:
A multi-modal chat system for integrating interactions among a household comprising a plurality of household users, the system comprising: a computing device, comprising at least one processor and at least one computer readable storage medium in communication with the at least one processor, the at least one computer readable storage medium having encoded thereon a set of instructions that are executable by the processor to cause the computer system to perform one or more operations, the set of instructions comprising: instructions for receiving user input via a user interface, the user input comprising an indication that a first household user wants to send a communication to be received by one or more second household users that belong to the same household as the first household user, wherein the plurality of household users comprises an inner circle of users and an extended circle of users, the inner circle comprising a first set of users within the household, and the extended circle comprising the first set of users within the household and one or more additional users outside the inner circle; instructions for determining, based on a context of the communication and without user interaction, whether the communication is time-sensitive; instructions for determining, based on the context of the communication, a set of one or more recipients of the communication selected from among the first set of users within the household; instructions for automatically selecting a mode for the communication, based on a first determination of whether the communication is time-sensitive and a second determination of the set of recipients, and without user selection of the mode for the communication; and instructions for sending the communication to the set of recipients using the selected mode.