Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Yahoo! Inc.

Tellme Networks, Inc.

Excalibur IP, LLC

Gary Clayton

Lisa Joy Stifelman

Madhusudan Chinthakunta

Rao Subrahmanyeswara Surapaneni

Victor Chen

Athellina Athsani

Brandon William Porter

Ronald Martinez

Joseph Adam Ruff

Jeffrey Bonforte

Ron Martinez

Karen M Cross

Robert P Starling

Michael D Trinkala

A method and apparatus enabling inter-widget communication and control uses a central server to receive selected widgets and settings associated with at least one widget, wherein the received settings are used to at least partly determine the settings of the other selected widgets according to a pre-defined relationship between or among the widgets.

System and method of inter-widget communication

A method of providing a ringback tone to a calling party. The method includes receiving a call directed to a subscriber from the calling party. At least one of an adaptive ringback tone and an actionable ringback tone is provided to the calling party. The adaptive ringback tone is based on state data.

Method and apparatus for providing ringback tones

Systems and methods for facilitating a decision-making process are disclosed. In one aspect of the present disclosure, in response to receiving a request to facilitate a decision making process, the decision-making agent participates in a communications thread where users are attempting to reach a decision regarding a business to frequent and/or an activity to partake. Since group activities are oftentimes scheduled via common communication threads, the decision-making agent can intervene in such communication threads, when requested, and assist the participating users in making a decision or making informed suggestions toward reaching an agreement.

Facilitating a decision-making process

A method and apparatus for incorporating voice recognition into a search engine is provided. The phonetic voice recognition system lacking grammar and spell checking is used. The output of the phonetic voice recognition system is forwarded to a search engine. The search engine performs disambiguation and relevancy analysis based on past similar queries. Search engine user behavior is recorded to improve the accuracy. Recorded statistics are used to rank results pages.

Navigation using a search engine and phonetic voice recognition

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Gary Clayton