American Telephone & Telegraph Co., At&t Bell Laboratories

Christine M Buss

Roger E Stone

George W Gawrys

Mark S Binkerd

A method and apparatus for setting up a telecommunications call from a calling customer (caller) terminal to one of a plurality of call destinations through an interconnection network. The caller dials an 800 number. This number is identified in a first data base as indicating a plurality of possible services, each of which is associated with one or more call destinations. A second data base provides the identification of a switch for generating an announcement to the customer and for the identification of an announcement in that switch. The call is connected to that announcement and an automatic speech and tone recognition unit, and the announcement prompts the caller to speak a command or key a dual tone multifrequency (DTMF) signal in order to select one of the possible destinations. Based on the number dialed by the caller, the Numbering Plan Area (NPA) code of the caller plus the command keyed or spoken by the caller and recognized by the recognition unit, one of a plurality of POTS (plain old telephone service) telephone numbers is selected by the second data base and the call is routed to a destination identified by that POTS telephone number. Advantageously, such an arrangement permits a business to use a single directory number for serving a plurality of services of the business, to select among these services on the basis of a command spoken or a DTMF signal keyed by a caller in response to an announcement of that business, and permits the business to receive the call at an appropriate destination for processing that call.

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Naperville, IL, United States of America

Christine M Buss