Patent Application
20060291629
The present invention relates generally to improvements in the field of mobile communication, and, in particular, to systems and methods for providing location enabled voice mail.
Voice mail is an important business service in the world of telecommunication. Voice mail is provided to both wireline and wireless devices. Consumers have voice mail at work, at home, and on their mobile devices. Lucent Technologies Inc. of 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974, a provider of communications products and services, has developed a messaging server, Anypath® Messaging System (AMS) for wireline and wireless devices. The AMS allows service providers the ability to offer a complete range of unified communication features to subscribers. AMS allows for a common user experience across public switched telephone network (PSTN), 2G/2.5G/3G, internet protocol (IP) and converged networks. By deploying a messaging server such as the AMS, subscribers can access, retrieve, and manage content and information from any wireline or mobile phone, personal computer (PC), personal digital assistant (PDA), and the like.
Location servers and accompanying software code such as Lucent Technologies' iLocator product provide a location based service platform which supports custom location and presence based services such as alerting and tracking family, friends and enterprises while incorporating privacy controls.
Voice mail is typically retrieved after some time has passed since the calling party left a voice mail message. In today's mobile culture, people are constantly on the go to meet work deadlines, to satisfy family obligations, and to squeeze in recreation or entertainment events. As the time interval increases between the time when a calling party left a message and the time when the called party or subscriber retrieves the message, the relevancy of the voice mail message may decrease and in some cases may be misleading.
Among its several aspects, the present invention recognizes that the capabilities of the aforementioned products can be advantageously combined and adapted as taught herein to provide a wide array of location enabled voice mail services as described further herein. While it is hard to envision all the creative uses that service providers may want to offer or mobile users may want from a location enabled voice system or service in accordance with the present invention, several illustrative examples are discussed below. With the present invention, a user could receive a location enabled voice mail service, such as a map containing both the previous and current location information of the calling party. The previous location being the location at the time the voice mail was left and the current location being the location at the time the voice mail was retrieved. Besides a map, the location enabled voice mail service may include a speech message, text message, or the like indicating the location of the calling party. Additionally, location enabled voice mail service indicating the previous and current locations of the calling party, or both could be conveyed to the party leaving the message. The map and messages may also contain previous and current location information of the called party. By providing such location information upon retrieval of a voice mail message, a subscriber may determine whether the retrieved voice mail message is still relevant, may deduce more relevant information not present in the voice mail message, or the like. A subscriber may also validate the expected location of the called party by receiving such location information when retrieving the corresponding voice mail message.
For example, if two people are planning to meet at a ball game, the calling party may leave a voice mail message with the called party requesting confirmation on where to meet. As an alternative or in addition, the called party may set a preference in his or her voice mail account to report the location of the calling party at the time the voice mail message was left and the location of the calling party when the voice mail is received. This preference may be dependent on a calling party number, called party number, time of day, or a combination thereof. When the called party retrieves the voice mail message, the present invention may deliver a map indicating the previous and current location of the calling party. From this map, the called party can determine, for example, 1) if the calling party is waiting for a return message before heading to the ball park, 2) if the calling party is running tangential errands on his or her way to the ball park, and 3) how far the calling party has traveled since leaving the message. Furthermore, the called party may select a preference for the map to plot his or her current location to determine how far apart the two parties are currently.
By way of another example, the teachings of the present invention allow employers to track remote employees who have responsibilities that involve being located at a client's site such as a delivery truck driver. When the delivery truck driver makes a delivery to a client, the driver would call a subscriber number and leave a voice mail message to confirm. The present invention can be utilized to provide a map or a voice or text message indicating the location of the truck driver when the call was made. The employer or supervisor may then retrieve the message and be delivered a map indicating where the truck driver was located at the time the message had been left allowing the employer or supervisor to verify that the truck driver actually made a delivery at an expected delivery time. Continuing with this example, the present invention may consolidate previous locations with each message left by a calling party. In this way, when the employer retrieves the latest voice mail from the calling party, a map indicating all the locations of the truck driver for that day will be plotted allowing the employer to track whether the truck driver made all of his or her deliveries on time. A similar approach may be employed to track remote service providers, such as phone installers or cable television repair personnel, appliance installers, or the like.
To this end, the present invention addresses among its several aspects a method for providing a location enabled voice mail service comprising the steps of storing at a first time a voice mail message from a calling device of a first party for a called device of a second party, obtaining first location information for the calling device about the first time, retrieving the voice mail message at a second time, and providing said location enabled voice mail service as a function of the first location information.
A more complete understanding of the present invention, as well as further features and advantages of the invention, will be apparent from the following Detailed Description and the accompanying drawings.
The present invention will now be described more fully with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which several presently preferred embodiments of the invention are shown. This invention may, however, be embodied in various forms and should not be construed as limited to the embodiments set forth herein. Rather, these embodiments are provided so that this disclosure will be thorough and complete, and will fully convey the scope of the invention to those skilled in the art.
As will be appreciated by one of skill in the art, the present invention may be embodied as methods, systems, or computer readable media. Accordingly, aspects of the present invention may take the form of a hardware embodiment, a software embodiment or an embodiment combining software and hardware aspects such as firmware. Furthermore, the present invention may take the form of a computer program on a computer-usable storage medium having computer-usable program code embodied in the medium. Any suitable computer readable medium may be utilized including hard disks, CD-ROMs, optical storage devices, flash memories, magnetic storage devices, or the like.
Computer program code or “code” for carrying out operations according to the present invention may be written in an object oriented programming language such as JAVA®, Smalltalk, JavaScript®, Visual Basic®, TSQL, Perl, C, C++ or in various other programming languages. Software embodiments of the present invention do not depend on implementation with a particular programming language. Portions of the code may execute entirely on one or more systems utilized by a server in the network or a mobile device.
The code may execute partly on one network server and partly on another network server or a mobile or wireless device in communication with the network server over a communications network. Regarding the former scenario,
The wireless network 110 is coupled to a set of intelligent network (IN) devices including the ISG 150, the messaging server 140 such as Lucent Technologies' AMS modified in accordance with the teachings of the invention, a messaging database 120, and a location server 160, such as Lucent Technologies' iLocator server modified in accordance with the teachings of the invention.
ISG 150 translates queries made in one communication protocol to another communication protocol. A suitable intelligent services gateway is a parlay/OSA (open services access) standard compliant network element that exposes network capabilities to end user applications. It provides a single entry point regardless of the different flavors of wireless networks such as time division multiple access (TDMA) digital, code division multiple access (CDMA) or universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) networks. It also adheres to different wireless standards such as location interoperability forum (LIF) to support querying of location information from the location related elements.
The location server 160 runs server code which provides a location and presence based track and alert service. Mobile devices, such as wireless devices 1051-105n and 1151-115n, may run client code to receive notifications of the presence and/or location of another wireless device. Location server 160 will be described in further detail in connection with
While devices 1051-105n are shown as wireless device, it should be recognized that many aspects of the present invention apply to a wide variety of other mobile devices capable of initiating or receiving telephone calls, as well as, the full range of wireline devices.
Wireless network 110 provides wireless devices voice and data connectivity to the intelligent network 101. Wireless network 110 typically connect devices which include a function of acting as a service switching point (SSP) which allows the wireless network 110 to communicate using signaling system 7 (SS/7) signaling protocol. In particular, integrated services digital network user part (ISDNUP) messaging is used to initiate a call. However, other protocols may also be used such as ISDN messaging protocols, and the like.
The messaging server 140 contains an intelligent database service that offers large database capabilities. In particular, messaging server 140 may couple to a messaging database 120 which stores predetermined profiles of subscribers in accordance with the teachings of the present invention. A profile may include subscriber preferences such as rules for sending a map indicating the location of the calling party when a voice mail message is left also referred to as the previous location information. Additionally or alternatively, the profile may include rules to indicate the location of the calling party when the voice mail message is retrieved also referred to as current location information. Similarly, the profile may include rules to indicate the previous location or current location of the called party, also known as the subscriber.
These rules may vary depending on particular calling numbers, the time of day a voice mail is left, the time of day the voice mail is retrieved, or any combination thereto. Additionally, the subscriber profile may also contain rules to send a tailored multimedia message to the subscriber which is dependent on the previous or current location information. The tailored multimedia message includes a map, a voice message, a text message, or any combination thereto.
For example, a subscriber may configure his or her profile to enable or block certain calling parties from receiving a tailored multimedia message. The profile may classify certain calling numbers into different categories and have different rules applied to the different categories. For example, the profile may include categories for co-workers, family, personal friends, or the like. Rules may be specified to enable or disable sending tailored multimedia messages to callers calling from numbers in these categories. Additionally, rules may be specified to enable or disable sending tailored multimedia messages to the voice mail subscriber. It should be noted that although these rules may be specified in a profile, the same rules may be additionally or alternatively specified in a voice prompt when a calling party is leaving a voice mail message or when the subscriber retrieves his or her voice mail. The messaging server 140 also may suitably execute user preference application code which applies the rules specified in a profile in response to a query.
Continuing with the exemplary call flow, the location server 160 may suitably employ well known tri-lateration based techniques to compute the locations using signal measurements from three or more base stations, for example. Alternatively, where a mobile device is connecting to the network with a Wi-fi® standard or Bluetooth® standard connection to a hot spot connection point or the like, the phone is registered at the connection point, and as the location of the connection point is known to the system, it can be readily determined that the mobile device is in proximity to the connection point and this location information can be utilized. Locations of wireline phones can be stored in accessible memory and looked up. While several examples are given above as to how location information can be obtained, it will be recognized that other techniques may also be employed.
The location server 160, in turn, queries ISG 150 with a get location query 223 to get the location information. In the depicted example of
The location server 160 forwards the location information to the messaging server 140. The messaging server 140 saves the location information to the messaging database 120 as previous location information for subsequent retrieval which will be discussed further in connection with the discussion of
The message server 140 may provide options to the subscriber to retrieve a map showing the current and previous locations of the calling and called parties or a multimedia message communicating the current and previous locations of the calling and called parties involved in his or her voice mail message. Additionally or alternatively, a subscriber profile in messaging database 120 may store the subscriber's preferences with regard to automatically retrieving a map if the voice mail message is from a particular calling party number. In this case, the message server 140, executing user preference application code, retrieves a subscriber profile corresponding to the subscriber and applies the rules stored in the profile for generating an appropriate MMS message. For example, the subscriber profile may trigger a rule to send speech or text message indicating the previous and current locations of the calling party or a map containing the previous and current locations of the calling party.
In the exemplary call flow 300, the subscriber requests a map containing the current locations of both the calling and called party involved in the voice mail message being retrieved. The messaging server 140 queries the location server 160 with a get location query 321 for both the calling number and called number.
Location server 160, utilizing the calling and called numbers, queries its database of records to retrieve the location information for the wireless device corresponding to the parties, such as wireless devices 1051 and 1151, for example. To retrieve the locations, the location server 160 may have to issue queries 325 and 327 through ISG 150 and, thus, through the wireless network 110 to get up to date location information for these devices. The ISG 150 converts query 323 from a protocol used in the intelligent network 101 to a second protocol used over the wireless network 110. The location of the parties are returned to ISG 150 from the wireless network 110 and forwarded to the location server 160 in a send message 328. The returned location may contain a raw location of the wireless devices 1051 and 1151 specified in latitude and longitude, for example, or may contain the geographic address such as “600 Mountain Ave., Murray Hill, New Jersey.”
Upon receipt of the current location information, the location server 160 also requests a map corresponding to the location returned for the calling party by issuing a getMap message 329 through ISG 150. The map may be retrieved from another intelligent peripheral connected to intelligent network 101 or may be retrieved by a service on the Internet accessed through ISG 150 as illustrated. The map is retrieved through ISG 150 and sent to the location server in a send message 330. The location server 160 sends the location of the parties and the retrieved map to the messaging server 140 in a send message 331. It should be noted that the function of retrieving a map based on a retrieved location may alternatively be performed by the messaging server 140.
The messaging server 140 retrieves the previous location information of the calling and called parties stored in the messaging server database 120 in a retrieve request message 333. Upon receipt of the previous information, the messaging server 140 plots the previous and current locations of the calling and called parties on the map and delivers the map in an MMS deliver message 335 to wireless device 1151. Since a map is requested in exemplary flow 300, the retrieved map will be centered on the current location of the calling party, along with the previous location of the calling party. Optionally, the map may indicate the current and previous location of the called party relative to the calling party's current location. In exemplary call flow 300, the subscriber party devices 1151-115n will have a display to display a map, picture, or text keyed to the location of the called party.
Query 321 can be initiated directly to the ISG 150 or to the location server 160. A direct interface to ISG 150 is suitable when only the location of the called party needs to be determined. However, when a location based MMS message, for example, a map of the current location of the called party is to be delivered, it is desirable to interface directly with location server 160 which supports this functionality. In general, the connection to the location server is used when the users are known to be on the same network with a similar wireless technology. In any other instance, it is recommended that the calls flow through the ISG which provides a protocol transparency for end user applications.
Further details of a suitable architecture 400 of a location server 160 interfacing with ISG 150 and messaging server 140 are shown in
Client code 470 executes on a wireless device such as wireless device 1151. As addressed above, the present location enabled approach is not just limited to cellular networks, but can also obtain the user location from a nearby Wi-fi® access point bypassing the call flow to the ISG 150. Once the current location of the calling party and a corresponding map is obtained by interfacing with the ISG 150 or location server 160 as described above or otherwise, the messaging server 140 retrieves previous location information and consolidates the previous and current location information on the obtained map. The messaging server 140 then delivers the map to the subscriber with the location information plotted.
Location server 160 can also play the role of reverse geocoding. In other words, location server 160 can be utilized to translate a raw location of a called user, specified in latitude and longitude, obtained from an ISG, such as ISG 150, to a geographic address, such as “Murray Hill, New Jersey”. This geographic address is then passed back to the messaging server 140 and is converted to synthetic speech which is then sent to the subscriber when he or she retrieves voice mail.
While the present invention has been disclosed mainly in a presently preferred context of cellular or wireless phones, it will be recognized that the present teachings are applicable to a wide array of mobile network accessible devices such as internet protocol (IP) phones, portable game devices, or the like, which can be used at various locations and which could be advantageously located using the present teachings.
