Nortel Networks Corporation

Robert A Williamson

Anne Grosman

Paul Michael Brennan

Pieter Groen

John C Myers

During a telephone call, a party to the call may signal (by, for example, sending certain DTMF tones (a wish to provide his or her location to the other party to the call. The central office responds to this request by accessing a subscriber record for the communication line (e.g., subscriber loop) terminating at the requesting party and sending location information in the subscriber record to the other party to the call. Depending upon the technology available, the location information may be supplied in-band or on a parallel datapath.

User controlled location sharing during a communication

When a caller calls a call busy called station, the caller may request that a message be provided to the called station while the caller waits. In such instance, the called station receives the message while busy with the other call. The message may be speech indications provided by the caller which are received by the called station at a volume normally associated with a whisper. The speech indications may be recorded from the caller and the caller given an opportunity to edit same before they are sent. The message may also be a text message where the called station supports text or has an associated text-based telephone appliance.

Call waiting messaging

An indication of urgency of a call is received from a caller. The urgency indication is communicated to the called party through a distinctive notification, such as distinctive ringing. The urgency indication may be obtained from a caller via a personal agent.

Urgency of call indication to called party through distinctive notification

A call answering system or device for a telephone network provides a mechanism for an outbound message (typically a greeting in a call answering scenario) to be identified as semi-interruptible. An attempt to skip over a semi-interruptible message activates a warning message to alert the caller of the special status of the message. The caller may then choose to resume listening to the original message, or confirm their decision to skip it.

Semi-interruptible messages for telephone systems making voice

A method and system for producing speech signals is disclosed. The speech signals are produced by sequentially reproducing a series of stored speech signal segments. The speech signals may be used to generate a voice message. The signals are formed by reproducing signal segments for system announcement messages and beginning, end and word-pair fragments for 'key' words. The system announcement messages and 'key' words define a dictionary for the system. The signal segments for word pair fragments correspond to the end portion of one word, a transition to another word and a beginning portion of that other word. The transition between sequentially produced 'key' words in a voice message generated from a signal produced from word pair fragments is audibly smooth. The resulting speech signal may correspond to any sequences of words from the dictionary. The method and system are suited for telephony applications, such as voice mail or directory assistance applications.

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Aurora, Canada

Robert A Williamson