Method of providing voicemails to a wireless information device

Abstract

Voicemail is received at a voicemail server and converted to an audio file format; it is then sent or streamed over a wide area network to a voice to text transcription system comprising a network of computers. One of the networked computers plays back the voice message to an operator and the operator intelligently transcribes the actual message from the original voice message by entering the corresponding text message (actually a succinct version of the original voice message, not a verbose word-for-word conversion) into the computer to generate a transcribed text message. The transcribed text message is then sent to the wireless information device from the computer. Because human operators are used instead of machine transcription, voicemails are converted accurately, intelligently, appropriately and succinctly into text messages (SMS / MMS).

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of the Invention [0002] This invention relates to a method of providing voicemails to a wireless information device. The term ‘wireless information device’ used in this patent specification should be expansively construed to cover any kind of device with two way wireless information capabilities and includes without limitation radio telephones, smart phones, communicators, wireless messaging terminals, personal computers, computers and application specific devices. It includes devices able to communicate in any manner over any kind of network, such as GSM or UMTS, CDMA and WCDMA mobile radio, Bluetooth, IrDA etc. [0003] 2. Description of the Prior Art [0004] Voicemail has the sole purpose of storing voice messages from someone trying to call a user's telephone when that user is otherwise unavailable and then relaying those messages to the user when convenient. But today's voicemail systems, particularly for wireless information devices suc...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0017] Because human operators are used instead of machine transcription, voicemails are converted accurately, intelligently, appropriately and succinctly into text messages (e.g. SMS / MMS).

[0038] Users will be able to buy SpinVox credit (e.g. £b 10's worth) via a single reverse billed SMS which will confirm their new credit. Typically this will appeal to the pre-paid market. This neatly avoids the relatively expensive cost (60%+) of many individual micro-transactions each time they use the Services which otherwise make this too expensive and encourages some commitment from the user to the service.

Problems solved by technology

But today's voicemail systems, particularly for wireless information devices such as mobile telephones, fail to do this intelligently.

This presents several challenges to the user: first, he may not have a pen and paper to hand to take down any important information; secondly, he may forget or not be able to hear the options and hence will be unable to operate the voicemail system effectively.

Because of this inadequate and opaque interface, voicemail is not used by at least 45% of mobile telephone users.

One of the reasons for this perhaps surprisingly high level is that, because of the difficult interface, users frequently dial in again just to listen to key messages they did not get the details of the first time round.

However, automated voicemail systems have quite limited performance and accuracy; they also slavishly transcribe the normal hesitations in human speech (‘er’, ‘um’, ‘ah’ etc.).

The overwhelming bias in the field of voice to text conversion systems is in improving the accuracy of automated voice recognition software; current generation software nevertheless still either needs to be trained to recognise words spoken by a specific person or is limited to recognising a very limited vocabulary and has huge difficulties with context.

This is a slow and arduous task.

Whilst this avoids the need to input a text message using the small keys of a mobile telephone, it does not address the inherent inaccuracy and inappropriate transcription of conventional automated voice recognition software.

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