The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a patent to iVoice for a speech-enabled automatic telephone dialer that uses an interface with computer-based address book programs such as Microsoft’s Outlook. The patent award is the first in a series of patents pending for its speech-enabled telephony applications for the Matawan, N.J.-based iVoice.
The phone dialing system imports the necessary contact information for dialing (names and phone numbers) from a variety of sources including Outlook, ACT, and Gold Mine. The imported names are then transcribed, through software, into a set of phonemes to be used for voice recognition.
When the end user picks up the handset, the call is automatically transferred through the PBX, to the name dialer software running on a server machine. The user says the name of the person (whose name came from the contact list) and the name dialer places the call.