US Patent 10452763 Autocomplete for integrating diverse methods of electronic communication

Instant messaging, also known as chat, is integrated with electronic mail in a user interface that provides for automatic completion of recipient names or addresses, such as email addresses or chat addresses, as a user types characters of the name or address when addressing a message. The automatic completion feature displays a list of matches, which are names or addresses in, for example, the user's online contact list, that match the characters the user types. The matches list may contain names or addresses for multiple different communication methods. The user may then select one of the names or addresses to compose a message to be sent to the selected name or address. A user interface is then provided for composing a message to be sent to the selected name or address using the communication protocol associated with the selected name or address.