Phonemate, Inc.

Other

Casio Phonemate, Inc.

Mark Karnowski

Eskandar Afshar

An electronic notepad associated with the entry, and storage, dialing of telephone numbers is disclosed. The telephone numbers are entered through a telephone touch pad and is displayed on a liquid crystal display. Attached to a stand alone telephone or a telephone answering device (also know as a TAD), telephone numbers which would otherwise be easily forgotten due to transient presentation are retained by the device for later retrieval or use.

Electronic notepad

A Telephone Answering Device (TAD) has a message transfer system for notifying the owner that a message has been recorded on the TAD and permitting the owner to hear the message by having the TAD automatically dial a preprogrammed telephone number of a telephone at a second location. The TAD would play back a prerecorded audio message to the person picking up the telephone at the second location advising the person that a message has been recorded on the TAD. The TAD calls the preprogrammed telephone a number of times until the telephone at the second location is answered. If the telephone at the second location is not answered after the predetermined number of tries, the attempt to send the transfer message is discontinued.

Telephone answering device with automatic function

An automatic gain controller uses a voltage controlled amplifier coupled to an averaging circuit that feeds back into the amplifier. The averaging circuit supplies a controlling voltage that keeps the amplifier output voltage tending towards a certain reference level. When the amplifier output is generally high, the averaging circuit output is also generally high and the reverse is also true for low signals. For low averaging circuit output voltages corresponding to low intensity signals, amplification of the signal by the amplifier is enhanced or augmented. The result is to boost the signal of low intensity signals significantly, compressing the dynamic range of an incoming signal received from a phone. This reduces the variance of an incoming phone line signal for an analog to digital converter (ADC) in a digital telephone answering device, and the effective dynamic range of the ADC is closer to optimum. A scaling circuit couples the signal from the automatic gain controller to the ADC.

Means for improving the dynamic range of an analog/digital converter in

A digital memory used by a digital telephone answering device to record messages, a method by which vacant memory space created by the deletion of a message interlying two saved messages is recovered for future message recording use. Available vacated memory is transferred to the top of memory while saved messages are moved to form a contiguous block in lower memory. The location of messages in the digital memory, and save/delete flag, are stored in an entry table for reference and memory management.

Memory management methods and apparatus for digital telephone answering

A telephone answering machine with a built in telephone that incorporates a mechanism for retrieving messages under a variety of operating conditions has the ability to access messages through the telephone handset to ensure privacy, while not interfering with normal telephone usage. The messages can also be played back through the speaker of the unit.

Handset or speaker message retrieval system

A telephone answering device (TAD) detects termination signals (Calling Party Control or CPC signals) on a telephone line by determining which signal is most probably a CPC signal, then comparing suspect signals to the determined signal. A series of memory registers store the value of an initial series of suspected CPC signals when the TAD is initially powered up. The stored values are compared with each other to confirm and validate the CPC signal. Upon finding a sufficiently repeated value, that value is stored and from there on used as the value for the CPC signal. Future signals received that are the same as the determined CPC signal terminate TAD operation.

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Garden Grove, CA, United States of America

Mark Karnowski