Certain telecommunications companies presently offer voice-activated contact information services. According to such a service, consider a person (called the user) who wishes to place a telephone call to another person or entity (called the recipient). The user calls a specific directory number that routes the user's call to a voice gateway. The voice gateway responds to the user's incoming call by audibly asking the user to name the intended recipient of the user's call. After receiving the user's response, the voice gateway fetches the user's contact information for the recipient from a server. The server has an associated database that stores the user's contact information. After retrieving the telephone number stored in the database for the recipient, the voice gateway completes the call to the recipient by placing a call to the number stored in the database associated with the recipient. In such a system, however, there is no indication that the recipient is currently accessible by telephone or, even if accessible, whether the recipient wants to receive telephone calls at the moment.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds