At+t Corp.

At&t Bell Laboratories

Marc P Kaplan

John Sutton Robertson

Ralph Carlsen

Brian Dean Freeman

Hui-Lan Lu

Lev Slutsman

Jay Gabin

Jonathan F Potter

Daryl M Goins

An improvement in the transparency of personal telecommunications over the prior art is achieved by automatically placing a return call from a personal communications unit of a called individual in response to a call from a caller and alerting the called individual to the existence of the call placed to his personal number only upon an indication that the call from the calling telephone remains in progress. In one embodiment of the invention, the called individual associates his personal communications unit with a telephone channel, before his reception of any calls. Should a caller make a call to the called individual's personal calling number, the telephone network causes the transmission of an actuation signal. In response to the actuation signal, the personal communications unit places a call to a predetermined number over a switched telephone network using the aforementioned associated telephone channel. As long as the telephone network determines that the caller's telephone call continues to be in progress, it sends an &ldquo;in progress&rdquo; signal over the telephone channel to the personal communications unit. During continued reception of the in-progress signal, the personal communications unit causes the generation of an alerting indication. A going off-hook on the telephone channel by a telephone during alerting results in completion of the caller's telephone call to the seizing telephone. To this end, the telephone network stops sending the in progress signal and bridges the caller's call to the return call placed by the personal communications unit.

Personal portable apparatus for use in completing a telephone call

A network assisted callback method and system for managing calls that fail to reach to a subscriber, and facilitating callback by the subscriber to one or more calling parties. In an embodiment of the invention, a call to a subscriber is routed to an interexchange network which attempts to complete the connection. If the caller fails to reach the subscriber, the network prompts the caller to determine whether a callback is desired, and to verify and obtain additional information. The network stores the information in a subscriber database file-folder. When the subscriber later decides to return phone calls, the subscriber dials an 800 number from any telephone station in order to access the network callback features. The network callback service may include automatic connection to the most recent calling party, or selective connection to any calling party. The network may effectuate this connection either by temporarily provisioning the 800 number with the number of the most recent calling party, or by making an outbound call to the calling party, and then merging the user's incoming call with the outbound call. The network assisted callback service provided by the present invention is also applicable as an enhancement to a 'locator phone' service or a normal pager service.

Network assisted callback system

An improvement in the transparency of personal telecommunications over the prior art is achieved by automatically placing a return call from a personal communications unit of a called individual in response to a call from a caller and alerting the called individual to the existence of the call placed to his personal number only upon an indication that the call from the calling telephone remains in progress. In one embodiment of the invention, the called individual associates his personal communications unit with a telephone channel, before his reception of any calls. Should a caller make a call to the called individual's personal calling number, the telephone network causes the transmission of an actuation signal. In response to the actuation signal, the personal communications unit places a call to a predetermined number over a switched telephone network using the aforementioned associated telephone channel. As long as the telephone network determines that the caller's telephone call continues to be in progress, it sends an 'in progress' signal over the telephone channel to the personal communications unit. During continued reception of the in-progress signal, the personal communications unit causes the generation of an alerting indication. A going off-hook on the telephone channel by a telephone during alerting results in completion of the caller's telephone call to the seizing telephone. To this end, the telephone network stops sending the in progress signal and bridges the caller's call to the return call placed by the personal communications unit.

Method for completing a conference with a personal communications units

Apparatus and method for connecting telephone calls using automated

Telephone call connection method with automated paging and call bridging

A cooperative network/premises-based automatic call distributor system and method is provided which minimizes networking costs associated with distributing calls to telemarketing agents in multiple locations, minimizes delays in providing desired services to callers, and improves the efficiency of telemarketing agents. A call directed to a telemarketing complex arrives at the network. The caller automatic number identification (ANI) and an identifying tag are forwarded via a data connection to a telemarketing agent management system which identifies an available and desired agent to service the call, and launches a call to the network location associated with the original caller, thus completing the connection. The telemarketing agent management system selects an appropriate agent based on data received from the telemarketing complex and from the network. Interactive queuing may also be performed by the network to provide additional information to assist call distribution and telemarketing agent response. In a further embodiment, the telemarketing agent management system may retrieve caller profile information while the revertive call is launched to the network location associated with the caller. In addition, telemarketing agents may be strategically assigned a priori to network switch locations resulting in superior call setup characteristics for certain calls.

Revertive calling automatic call distributor

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for interfacing different service creation environments (SCEs) and execution environments (EEs) in a telecommunication system. A telecommunication system interface in accordance with the present invention includes at least one SCE to be interfaced to a plurality of service EEs; a parser for parsing output code from the SCE to form a parse tree representing a telecommunication service developed in the SCE; an intermediate code generator for generating an intermediate code representing nodes of the parse tree such that the intermediate code preserves substantially all the information contained within the SCE output code; and a target code generator for generating a target code for each of the EEs from the intermediate code, such that the telecommunication service developed in the SCE may be provided in each of the EEs.

Application-oriented telecommunication system interface

A subscriber-defined call processing program designed for execution in a communications network is subjected to testing procedures which simulate a call processing environment involving the execution of the program. The testing procedures assess the program's fitness for execution in a communications network and compute threshold values of network resource consumption by calls invoking execution of the program so that those calls can be terminated when those threshold values are exceeded in the course of processing those calls in the communications network.

System for control of subscriber progragmmability

An enhanced '800' service translates an Automatic Number Identification (ANI) of a calling party into a customer data base key defined by the called party. The customer data base key is then provided by the enhanced '800' service to the called party in place of the ANI information.

Growing community of inventors

Aberdeen, NJ, United States of America

Marc P Kaplan