This invention relates to the delivery of messages, such as email messages, in telecommunications networks.
Electronic messaging techniques, such as e-mail, voicemail and the Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS) available in GSM telecommunications networks, have in the last decade become very widely used for both interpersonal and interbusiness communication, but in present implementations these different messaging techniques are only integrated one with another to a limited extent.
For instance, systems are known and commonly implemented by mobile telephony operators which enable a user to access email via voice channels. Typically using such systems a user can obtain a text to speech readout of the text contained in an email message. Such text-to-speech portal systems are described for instance in WO99/65256 and WO01/59998 (ETRIEVE INC). Email can also be accessed from a cellular phone via various types of data channels, such as WAP or i-mode, through WML-based WAP gateways, for instance, in the case of WAP.
However, a difficulty with the use of voice channels to access e-mail is the handling of non-text and non-audio attachments.
In brief, this invention is directed to a method of delivering an email message, in for instance standard Internet MIME format, to a remote terminal comprising parsing the message to identify a header and at least two content items; and dispatching the content items, or at least one of said content items and at least information derived from the header, to the remote terminal using at least two different channels for separate content items or for the content item and the information derived from the header, at least one of which two different channels is a store and forward channel.
The message parts can include a message text and one or more attachments and the message text can be delivered via a voice channel. The header information, which may include for instance the name or email address of the sender, can be transmitted in any suitable manner, such as by SMS or together with the message text.
In at least preferred embodiments, at least one of the message parts comprises a file and the method comprises converting at least one identified file into one or more separately displayable image files which are dispatched to a client using the store and forward channel.
The step of dispatching the image files can, for instance, comprise sending one or more MMS messages to the remote terminal, via an MMS service centre.
It will be understood that the invention has been devised primarily for the situation where the remote terminal is a telephone handset, particularly a wireless telephone handset such as a GSM or similar cellular telephone. Application to other similar or comparable situations or to a suitable configured fixed handset is, however, not excluded.
In at least some embodiments, the user of the remote terminal can be presented with a option to receive the message parts or file attachments after having been presented with the message text.
The method is carried out, for instance by a voice portal application, that is arranged to retrieve the email message from a server using a standard Internet email access protocol, such as POP or IMAP.
In this way, the invention can be used to provide a simple, easily understood and easily used way of accessing a relatively common form of email message, that is a simple text message that can relatively easily be delivered using text to speech readout, or disregarded, followed by content that is, or can be transformed into, a series of images, such as a set of photographs for instance. As such, the method may conveniently be invoked by substantially a single option presented to the user at the remote terminal for selection or selected by the user through configuration of a user profile. This option may be suitably named to enable ready recognition of the functionality by the user.
In another of its aspects, the invention provides apparatus for delivering an email message to a remote terminal comprising a parser for parsing the message to identify a header and at least two content items; and functionality for dispatching the content items or at least one of said content items and at least information derived from the header to the remote terminal using at least two different channels for separate content items or for the content item and the information derived from the header, at least one of which two different channels is a store and forward channel. In preferred embodiments, the dispatch functionality comprises an MMS user agent for sending one or more MMS messages to an MMS service centre.
The dispatch functionality can comprise text to speech functionality and be arranged to deliver at least one content item extracted from the message and containing text via a voice channel, for instance.
In preferred embodiments, the apparatus comprises at least one converter for converting content items extracted from messages of at least one identified file type into one or more separately displayable image files, the dispatch functionality being arranged to dispatch the image files to the remote terminal using the store and forward channel.
The apparatus can be realised in the form of computer program code elements arranged to perform the above described methods in conjunction with conventional computer and interactive media platform hardware and software.
A voice portal system application embodying the invention will now be described, by way of non-limiting example, with reference to the accompanying diagrammatic drawings, in which:
The relevant components of voice portal 120 are shown in more detail in
Also comprised in voice portal 120 is MMS user agent functionality 220 and an application layer 230. Application layer 230 includes one or more adapter units, of which 3 are illustrated as 240a, 240b and 240c. In addition, the voice portal may include or have access to a database 240 which holds user profile and other data. Database 240 may be private to the voice portal or may be another database in use in the system, such as a Home Location Register for instance, to which the voice portal 120 has access.
The general structure of the protocols that determine the interactions between handset 100, mail server 110, voice portal 120 and MMSC 130 are shown in
Initially, the user may be alerted to the existence of unread email on mail server 110. This may be carried out by any suitable technique such as the sending of a SMS message and is illustrated by arrow A in
The user, via handset 100, interacts with voice portal 120 via a suitable IVR dialog and navigates to the point where they are able to select an option to read an email. This initial dialogue is represented by arrow 300 in
Once a user has indicated that they wish to read an email, voice portal interacts with mail server 110 to retrieve at least one email as illustrated by arrows 310a and 310b in
Internet e-mail is described in RFC822: “Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages”. Internet e-mail messages include header elements and text. Further content items can be included in messages using the Multipart Internet Mail Extension MIME, RFC2045: “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies”; RFC2046: “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types”; and RFC2047: “MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part Three: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text”.
The retrieved email message to be delivered is parsed within voice portal 120 to identify the header and its content items. It will be appreciated that the parsing and analysis of email messages to identify and extract their headers and content items is in itself well-known and need not be described herein. This processing may be carried out between steps 310b and 320a and before steps 330 and 340 shown in
In step 320a, the user is presented with initial information regarding the email. This information may include information contained in the email header, such as the name and/or email address of the sender of the email, the number an type of attachments contained with it, the time and/or date of receipt and the subject of the message or the like as desired. Other parts of the email header, such as the message ID or the addressee information for instance, may only delivered to the user if explicitly required by the user. This header information may be delivered to the user in any suitable way, for instance via an SMS message or text to speech conversion. The content of a message text may also in some embodiments or configurations be automatically delivered at this point in the form of a text to speech readout although this is not essential and may not be required by the user. Once the user has been able to understand the number and type of the content items within the email, the user is prompted to indicate whether they wish to receive any attachments within the email. The transmission of this information is indicated generally with arrow 320b.
Once voice portal 120 has available sufficient information to determine how the user wishes to have the email delivered, it can proceed to actual delivery of the email. Certain content items such as a message text and/or any audio file attachments may be delivered directly to the user via the voice channel through which the dialogue with voice portal 120 is being conducted as illustrated by arrow D in
The details and transmission of MMS messages over 2G and so-called 2.5G telecommunications networks as such is well known and will not be described in detail herein except to state that the MMS scheme provides a store and forward message channel which enables any type of data to be sent to a mobile GSM handset. Unlike the Short Message Service (SMS), MMS messages are not restricted to containing text only or in size. Rather, it is possible to embed any type of content in a message. This includes, for example, audio and video material and still images. Details of the service can be found in 3GPP TS 22.140 version 3.1.0 Release 99 (Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS); Stage 1) and 3GPP TS 23.140 (Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS); Functional description; Stage 2) version 3.10 Release 99.
Where the content item is not initially a single image, or whatever other type can be readily handled by handset 100, an appropriate converter may be provided for transforming the content item into one or more image files. A number of different such converters may be provided in voice portal 130 one for each file type the portal is capable of handling. For example, a converter may be provided that can transform a Microsoft Powerpoint™ file into a series of images, one for each slide. Similarly a word processed document such as a Microsoft Word™ or Adobe Acrobat™ file may be presented as a series of images representing a series of printed pages. In the latter case, the user may usefully be presented with the option, in the dialogue represented by arrows 320a and 320b, as to whether the document be delivered as a series of images via MMS or as a Text to Speech readout via the voice channel.
It will be appreciated that a simple text message followed by either a series of images, such as a set of photographs or a Microsoft Powerpoint™ type presentation file represents an extremely common form of email message and therefore it is considered that a relatively large proportion of email messages may in practice be delivered in the manner described herein using a relatively small number of converters and using a relatively simple dialogue or set of configuration options to set up the delivery mode. Moreover, it will be appreciated that voice portal 120 may be designed to be modular so that new converters may be developed and installed relatively easily, either by the developer of the portal itself, by the provider of the application program that generates the file format concerned, or by third parties according to circumstances. Three such converters or adapter units are illustrated in
The converter itself may conduct or use information provided by a dialogue with the user or user profile to enable, for instance, slides to be selected for delivery from a presentation or pages to be selected from a document.
Once the images have been dispatched as MMS messages and received at MMS service centre 130, MMS service centre alerts the user to the presence of the messages in conventional manner and the user may retrieve them at their convenience. These interactions, which are conventional MMS interactions between the handset 100 and MMS service centre 130, are illustrated in
It will be appreciated that
In summary, this embodiment provides a method of delivering an email message comprising parsing the message to identify one or more files therein; converting at least one of said identified files into one or more separately displayable image files and dispatching the image files to a user by sending one or more MMS messages to an MMS service centre.
Although a specific embodiment of the invention has been described, the invention is not to be limited to the specific arrangement so described. The invention is limited only by the claims. The claims themselves are intended to indicate the periphery of the claimed invention and are intended to be interpreted as broadly as the language itself allows, rather than being interpreted as claiming only the exemplary embodiment disclosed by the specification.
Number | Date | Country | Kind |
---|---|---|---|
03292291.6 | Sep 2003 | EP | regional |