Inbound Call Control via Community Spam Score Intermediary
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Solution Overview
Problem
The increasing volume of unsolicited and unwanted telephone calls, commonly known as 'telemarketing' or 'spam' calls, poses a significant intrusion into personal privacy, with existing solutions failing to effectively address the issue of identifying and blocking such calls.
Innovation Solution
A system and method for controlling inbound calls using a call control unit that communicates with a server to determine if additional information about the caller exists, such as a spam score, allowing for user-configurable operations like blocking, forwarding, or terminating calls, utilizing a community blacklist and user-configurable blacklists/whitelists to manage incoming communications.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional call blocking methods are used, then some spam calls are blocked, but the accuracy of identifying unwanted calls is insufficient and many spam calls still get through
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a server as an intermediary between the call control unit and the call filtering process. The server maintains a community blacklist and performs spam score calculations, allowing the call control unit to offload complex identification tasks and achieve higher accuracy without increasing local device complexity
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback mechanisms where user reports of spam calls are processed by the server to update the community blacklist and recalculate spam scores. This continuous feedback loop improves identification accuracy over time while distributing the computational burden to the server
2Reliability
If a community blacklist system is implemented, then spam call identification accuracy improves, but the system complexity and data management requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges individual user blacklists into a centralized community blacklist maintained on the server. This consolidation improves spam identification accuracy by aggregating data from multiple users while the server handles the complexity of data management, keeping individual devices simple
Solution Approach 2:
The server acts as an intermediary that manages the complexity of the community blacklist system, handling data storage, updates, and spam score calculations, thereby improving identification accuracy without burdening individual call control units with complex data management
3Reliability
If real-time spam score calculation is performed, then call filtering accuracy is enhanced, but the processing time and energy consumption increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-calculating and storing spam scores in the community blacklist before calls occur. When a call is received, the call control unit simply queries the pre-computed spam score from the server, achieving accurate filtering without real-time calculation delays
Solution Approach 2:
The server intermediary pre-processes spam score calculations and stores results in the community blacklist, allowing call control units to quickly retrieve pre-computed scores without performing time-consuming real-time calculations, thus maintaining accuracy while reducing processing time
Data Source
AI summary
An indication of an incoming call may be received at a call control unit communicatively coupled to, and/or resident within, a telephone. The indication may include identification information for the incoming call. It may be determined whether additional information regarding a caller associated with the identification information exists, and if so, a first operation may be performed on the incoming call responsively to the additional information, otherwise, a second operation may be performed on the incoming call responsively to an absence of the additional information. The additional information my include a user-configurable list of desired callers (e.g., a whitelist) and/or undesired callers (e.g., a blacklist). The additional information may also include caller identification information and/or a spam score. The first operation may be blocking the incoming call, forwarding the incoming call to a voice mailbox, transmitting the incoming call to the telephone, enabling the telephone to receive the incoming call, and/or answering the incoming call and then terminating the incoming call. In some embodiments, the first and/or second operations performed on the incoming call is/are user configurable.