Tellme Networks, Inc.

Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Angus Macdonald Davis

Hadi Partovi

Lisa Joy Stifelman

Roderick Steven Brathwaite

John Giannandrea

Michael S McCue

Brandon William Porter

Eckart Walther

Rao Subrahmanyeswara Surapaneni

Anne K Sullivan

Sarah A Caplener

Karen M Cross

Rajeev Khurana

Justin B Ward

Eugene Koh

Matthew T Marx

Anthony Accardi

Zhe Li

David Bryan Alpert

Scott James Bailey

Haleh Partovi

Kyle D Sims

Darby McDonough Bailey

James Robert Everingham

Daphne Huetu Luong

Jeff C Kunins

Patrick McCormick

Andrew Clarke

Tom Thai

Daniel Joseph Howard

Andy Scott

Michael M Plitkins

Information associated with messages and/or missed calls is provided to a subscriber. Calls received but not answered by the subscriber may be monitored. Each monitored call is classified as one of a missed call and a message. The monitored calls may be summarized based on a customizable rule set to create a summary. The summary is provided to the subscriber via, for example, a voice notification.

Providing missed call and message information

One embodiment in accordance with the invention is a method that includes automatically identifying a telephone number associated with an incoming or outgoing telephone call. The telephone call is associated with a telephone system account. A name is automatically determined that corresponds to the telephone number. The name and the telephone number are automatically stored in association with an electronic address book.

Smart capture for populating an address book with entries

A method of accessing and updating an electronic phonebook over electronic communications networks such as a telephone and computer networks is described. The creation of a voice portal is supported by the invention. Embodiments of the invention use telephone identifying information such as the calling party's number to identify, or create, user profiles for customization. The user profile can include personalized phonebook entries that include names and telephone numbers of relevance to the user. Additionally, the voice portal can connect the user to numbers contained in the personalized phonebook in response to spoken commands. The profile can also be updated with additional phonebook entries over the interne using a web browser.

Updating an electronic phonebook over electronic communication networks

A method and apparatus for providing personalized information content over telephones is described. The creation of a voice portal is supported by the invention. Embodiments of the invention use telephone identifying information such as the calling party's number to identify, or create, user profiles for customization. The personalized content is specific to that user based on her/his telephone identifying information and may be further customized based on the current time, current date, the calling party's locales, and/or the calling party's dialect and speech patterns. In some embodiments, the dialect is selected from a range of common American English dialects according to the locale of the calling party. For example, callers from the Northern Midland will automatically hear a Northern Midland dialect, while callers from the Coastal Southeast will hear that dialect, etc. Individuals can change the dialect to better suit their personal tastes.

Content personalization over an interface with adaptive voice character

A method and system for providing efficient menu services for an information processing system that uses a telephone or other form of audio user interface. In one embodiment, the menu services provide effective support for novice users by providing a full listing of available keywords and rotating house advertisements which inform novice users of potential features and information. For experienced users, cues are rendered so that at any time the user can say a desired keyword to invoke the corresponding application. The menu is flat to facilitate its usage. Full keyword listings are rendered after the user is given a brief cue to say a keyword. Service messages rotate words and word prosody. When listening to receive information from the user, after the user has been cued, soft background music or other audible signals are rendered to inform the user that a response may now be spoken to the service. Other embodiments determine default cities, on which to report information, based on characteristics of the caller or based on cities that were previously selected by the caller. Other embodiments provide speech concatenation processes that have co-articulation and real-time subject-matter-based word selection which generate human sounding speech. Other embodiments reduce the occurrences of falsely triggered barge-ins during content delivery by only allowing interruption for certain special words. Other embodiments offer special services and modes for calls having voice recognition trouble. The special services are entered after predetermined criterion have been met by the call. Other embodiments provide special mechanisms for automatically recovering the address of a caller.

Providing menu and other services for an information processing system using a telephone or other audio interface

A voice portal supporting telephone to web server commerce is described. The voice portal allows users to access web servers using a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), optionally including the use of a secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol, to complete commercial transactions. Additionally, embodiments of the invention can employ a one word commerce model that abstracts the particular model used by various electronic commerce vendors' web sites. The one word commerce model permits a user to identify a product and signal her/his purchase intentions with a single word, phrase, or touch-tone command. The voice portal can then complete the transaction supplying the electronic commerce vendor necessary information about the purchaser, e.g., her/his address, telephone number, electronic mail address, credit card information, etc. As needed, the voice portal can prompt the purchaser for information.

Method and apparatus for electronic commerce using a telephone interface

A method and apparatus for providing personalized information content over telephones is described. The creation of a voice portal is supported by the invention. Embodiments of the invention use telephone identifying information such as the calling party's number to identify, or create, user profiles for customization. The personalized content is specific to that user based on her/his telephone identifying information and may be further customized based on the current time, current date, the calling party's locales, and/or the calling party's dialect and speech patterns. Also, the telephone identifying information may support targeted advertising, content, and purchasing recommendations specific to that user. The system may use a voice password and/or touch-tone login system when appropriate to distinguish the caller or verify the caller's identity for specific activities. Typically, embodiments of the invention will immediately present a caller personalized content based on her/his profile using the appropriate dialect as well as the caller's preferred content. Profiles can be constructed as the caller uses embodiments of the invention as well as through explicit designation of preferences. For example, the user might specify an existing personalized site to use in building her/his profile. Additionally, new callers may have an initial profile generated based on one or more database lookups for demographic information based on their telephone identifying information.

System for providing personalized content over a telephone interface to a user according to the corresponding personalization profile including the record of user actions or the record of user behavior

Providing services for an information processing system using an audio interface

A zero-footprint remotely hosted phone application development environment is described. The environment allows a developer to use a standard computer without any specialized software (in some embodiments all that is necessary is a web browser and network access) together with a telephone to develop sophisticated phone applications that use speech recognition and/or touch tone inputs to perform tasks, access web-based information, and/or perform commercial transactions. Some embodiments support concurrent call flow tracking that allows a developer to observe, using a web browser, the execution of her/his application. A variety of reusable libraries are provided to enable the developer to leverage well-developed libraries for common playback, input, and computational tasks. Embodiments support rapid application deployment from the development environment to hosted application deployment to the intended audience.

Method and apparatus for zero-footprint phone application development

A method and apparatus for providing streaming content over telephones is described. The creation of a voice portal is supported by the invention. Embodiments of the invention use allows users to place a telephone call to access the voice portal. The user can access many different types of content. This content can include text based content which is read to the user by a text to speech system (e.g., news reports, stock prices, text content of Internet sites), audio content which can be played to the user (e.g., voicemail messages, music), and streaming audio content (e.g., Internet broadcast radio shows, streaming news reports, and streaming live broadcasts). This content can be accessed from many different places. For example, the content can be retrieved from a news feed, a local streaming content server, an audio repository, and/or an Internet based streaming content server. The streaming content allows the user to access live web broadcasts even though the user may not have access to a computer. The system allows audio signals from multiple sources to be combined to enhance the user experience. Additionally, the user can control many aspects of the delivery of the streaming content. Personalization features of the voice portal allow for an improved user experience during streaming content delivery.

Streaming content over a telephone interface

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Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Angus Macdonald Davis