A system and method for a phone device to receiving notice from a notification system and perform one or more tasks. In the following description, for purpose of explanation, numerous of specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of the present invention.
The notification system receives signal or message from applications, the network interface 0103, or input/output devices 0104. The notification receives at least one user's trigger condition and returns a phone group to user. One or more phone identities in the phone group are used to call said user at the event that matches with the trigger condition.
In the present invention, the phone device to receive notification by telephone call can be any telephone phone, for example a mobile phone manufactured by Nokia Inc etc.
In one embodiment, user uses web browser on a desktop computer to login to Web server on notification system 0100 through Internet. Notification system determines user's identity through the login process. The Web server displays a trigger condition creation Web page with multiple trigger condition options for user to choose, for example new e-mail arrival, stock price at new highs and lows, or the score of a sport event. User is allowed to specify more detail conditions, for example the e-mail sender must be john@yahoo.com. User further specifies a group of destination phone number for the notification system to call upon the trigger event occurred. The Web site certainly can provide a tool for user to specify user's own trigger condition instead of the pre-formatted trigger condition. When user selects OK on the creation page, system 10 stores the trigger condition in the database 0107 and associates the trigger condition with the destination phone group and further associates with a source phone group. Said each phone group might contain one or more phone identities, such as numbers or Caller IDs. Depending on the phone system, a Caller ID might contain the phone number part and the name part, and either part can be used to identify phone origination in the phone groups. The selection of source phone group might be based on the area code of the phone number in the destination phone group, the source phone group of user's other trigger condition, or further based on the load balancing decision, which is to balance the number of trigger conditions assigned to each source phone number or the possibility of occurrence. Upon the trigger event that matches with the trigger condition, notification system instructs a phone dialer to make phone call from a phone number in the source phone group to a phone number in the destination phone group. The notification certainly can try to call more or all phone number in the destination phone group. In this embodiment, a mapping module of the notification system automatically assigns the source phone number to each of trigger conditions. However, user might be allowed to choose the source phone from a pool of phone numbers in other embodiment. In an alternative embodiment, user might use web browser on a smart phone to connect to the Web server through wireless data communication network instead of using the desktop computer. In yet another embodiment, user might use a customized application program, instead of web browser, on a PocketPC phone to setup the trigger conditions through wireless data communication network.
After notification system successfully registering a trigger condition, the notification system returns the group of source phone number or caller ID back to user through a Web page or directly to the customized program on user's phone. If multiple trigger conditions are registered, the mapping between trigger conditions and source phone groups is returned to user. Then, user can assign a special ring tone for the incoming call from one or more of the source phone numbers on user's phone device. In another embodiment, user might schedule a job on user's phone for replaying a pre-recorded audio message upon detecting an incoming call from one of said source phone groups, for example said “You got mail from John” when incoming call from 80112345 or 80112346 in
In an embodiment, user would like to receive the phone call from an important Internet phone caller. The Internet phone, for example Skype manufactured by Skype Limited, runs on a desktop computer. However, user is away from the desktop computer. User schedules a trigger condition with said notification system 0100 for notifying said user upon said important Internet phone caller calls said user through the Internet phone. To register Internet phone callers, the user sends the notification system one or more Internet phone caller identities and a user information for determining the destination phone group. The user information is either the user's one or more phone numbers or user's identity for determining user's phone. The mapping module of the notification system of the present embodiment associates each of said Internet phone caller identities to a source phone group. The mapping between Internet phone caller identity and source phone group is stored in database 0107 and is returned to the user. The relation between the phone number or caller ID in source phone group and the identity of the Internet phone caller can be added into the contact list in user's phone by user manually or by a program automatically. User can incrementally add new phone caller to notification system. The notification system preferably assigns the new phone caller a new source phone group that is different from the source phone group for user's existing phone caller. The notification system detects the event that one of the registered Internet phone caller calls the user through Internet phone. There are many way to signal notification system, for example plug in a program into user's Internet phone to send notification system the caller identity when receiving an incoming call or have the notification system login the Internet phone system as said user, wherein the notification system will know who is calling the user. By knowing the identity of Internet phone caller and identity of the user, the notification system then retrieves the related source phone group and destination phone group from database 0107 and instructs phone dialer 0108 to call one or more phones in the destination phone group from one or more phones in the source phone number. When user's phone received call from a phone in the source phone group, user's phone shows the phone number, or caller ID, of the incoming call and the present invention will further shows the identity of the Internet phone caller. User can either ignore the phone call or answer the phone call. If user answers the phone call, the dialer automatically bridges the Internet phone caller and the user. If user miss the phone call and later dial back to the source phone number, the notification system can derive the identity of latest Internet phone caller from the user's phone number or caller ID, and then call the Internet phone caller through the Internet phone, and bridge the Internet phone caller and the user. Since said each of user's Internet phone caller is associated with a distinct group of source phone number, the user can tell the identity of the Internet phone caller by looking at the incoming call phone number, caller ID, or the Internet phone caller identity. In another embodiment, when registering the identity of Internet phone caller, notification system can automatically generate a contact list that associates the phone number in source phone group to the related Internet phone caller identity. The contact list can then be sent to user's phone and appended to the contact list in the phone. In yet another embodiment, the notification system further provides user a call back phone number for each Internet phone caller. User can call (or call back) an Internet phone caller by calling the related call back phone number. The notification system can derived the identity of the Internet phone caller from the call back phone number and the incoming call phone number or caller ID, which identifies the user. The notification system further calls the Internet phone caller through the Internet phone system, and bridges the user and the Internet phone caller. If several user's Internet phone callers share the same call back phone number, the user will be bridge to most recent unsuccessful Internet phone caller. The present application basically provides a solution to map the first group of caller identity to the second group of caller identity. Two groups might pertain to the same phone system or to different phone systems, for example one is PSTN system and one is VoIP system. This application allows user or user's phone to derive the caller's identity in the second group from the identity of the incoming phone in the first group.
In another embodiment, the notification system does not have enough outgoing phone lines and some of the Internet phone callers need to share the same source phone group. The present embodiment can further assign these shared Internet phone callers to different time slots. For example, notify user at the first quarter of a minute when caller A calls and notify user at the second quarter of a minute when caller B calls. This embodiment uses less phone resource but might have some delay for waiting for the correct time slot.
Although the monitor system on user's phone is tightly integrated with the notification system, the monitor system can also be used independently. User can schedule a job to be executed upon an incoming call from a particular contact, caller, or phone number, which does not necessary the phone number selected by the notification system. In one embodiment, user schedules a reminder that is associated with a contact, caller, or phone number. In addition to the ring tone or a picture that identifies the caller of an incoming call, the monitor system further presents the reminder message to user upon receiving a call from said contact, caller, or phone number. Since incoming caller's phone number or caller ID already tell user who the caller is, said reminder of the present invention is for reminding user extra information in addition to who the caller is. In the preferred embodiment, said extra information might be related to one or more selected from an event, a time, a place, a thing, or another contact. For example in Microsoft Outlook, a contact can be associated with information related to an event in the calendar, a task in to-do list, an e-mail in e-mail box, a note, a entry in journal, or another contact, etc. In another embodiment, user schedules a job to open a document by a document reader. For example, user's boss might call user for a discussion and user would like to tell his boss a research summary in a spreadsheet. The user can schedule a job to open the spreadsheet document upon user's boss call the user. Alternatively, the monitor system can monitor the outgoing call. The monitor system can automatically perform a scheduled job when user is calling a phone number or person that associated with said job. For example, user select a contact from the contact list in his phone and input a reminder message “Ask pick up time” for associating with the contact. When user initiate a call to the contact, the monitor system detects the outgoing call and retrieves the reminder message associated with said contact and executes a default job that presents said reminder message to the user. The way to present a reminder is well known in the art, for example presenting in text, picture, audio, video, etc. If the contact calls the user first, the monitor system identify the contact according to the phone number or caller ID of the incoming call, retrieve the associated information, and present the information to the user. So, in either case, the user will be reminded to ask the other call party the pick up time.
The present invention provides a notification system that calls user's phone from a pre-selected phone that associates with a trigger conditions upon detects the trigger event of said trigger conditions. On user's phone, the present invention further provides a monitor system that triggers a pre-selected job upon detecting an incoming call from or outgoing call to a pre-selected contact according to phone number or Caller ID.
Although the description above contains many specific details, these should not be construed as limiting the scope of the invention but as merely providing illustrations of some the possible embodiments of the invention.
Thus, the scope of the invention should be determined by the appended claims and their legal equivalents, rather than by the examples given.
Number | Date | Country | |
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60744345 | Apr 2006 | US | |
60865403 | Nov 2006 | US |