Alexander I. McAllister

Providing automated voice responses with variable user prompting

A voice response unit (VRU) includes a library of content equivalent messages and prompts which may be substituted for one another to vary the presentation of messages provided to a user and thereby more closely simulate a human operator. Groups of content equivalent messages and prompts include multiple audio files, each with a slightly different wording or phraseology, but conveying substantially the same information. After a particular message content is selected, the corresponding group of messages is identified and a random number is generated and used to select one of the audio files of the group for playback. The VRU may be included as part of an automated dialer or auto attendant. In such a system, a calling party is greeted by the VRU and is prompted by a randomly selected prompt to speak the name of the called party. The system accesses a telephone directory, attempts to identify a name corresponding to the name spoken, and dials the number. The caller may interrupt or request alternative processing during a predetermined time period after the system has selected and read back a closest matching name or its corresponding telephone number. If processing is halted by the caller indicating that the name or telephone number selected by the system is incorrect, the system will attempt to identify a second closest guess, or if none is available, to ask the caller to reinput the name of the called party. Alternative processing includes hearing the telephone number without having it dialed, and diverting a call to voice mail.

Phonetic voice activated dialing

A telephone communications system Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) platform provides a voice activated call dialing functionality through speaker independent phoneme speech recognition having a minimum volume of storage without requiring user template training. Speaker independent phoneme recognition identifies phoneme strings of caller spoken utterances which are then compared to phoneme string representations that previously have been stored in respective caller processing records (CPRs) for those subscribers listed in the ISCP database, or stored in an equivalent peripheral database with which the ISCP can communicate. Each stored phoneme string representation is associated in the CPR with a destination telephone number that may then be extracted to route a call.