Smart speed dial (18-Aug-2009)
Today people generally have more than one phone number by which they can be reached. A typical person, we’ll call her “Sally”, could possess a number of contact numbers e.g. a home phone, business phone, business cell phone and a personal cell phone. Current implementations of speed-dial are limited to assigning a unique key to each unique contact number. Using the example of Sally, you would need 4 speed-dial key presses to cover all of Sally’s contact numbers. Some prior-art implementation of speed-dial offer a special button/function by which one can quickly search through a list of numbers, allowing you to pick from that list. Yet, one still has to focus on the calling device to select a contact from the available list. This disclosure moves speed-dialing to what it was meant to be i.e. a single button that can be pushed and the number(s) behind it are dialed without any additional steps that might distract a person. This is important for those who are in situations that make it difficult, or impossible to wade through a long list of numbers to contact a needed party.
Smart speed dial
The idea is to use the unique key speed-dialer as reference to a user folder. The device also learns from every call. The caller picks the contact number either directly from the folder or by using the speed-dial reference to the folder. The pattern (month/day/time) and results (answering service, no pick up etc.) of a call is learned and builds a trend over time.
Over time the pattern of completed calls for a given person can be used to associate what number to dial given the month/day/time the call is attempted. Thus, the advantage of the 'Smart speed-dial' over the exiting art of 'contacts' is the fact that the speed-dialer moves closer to what it is supposed to be, a one-[long]-push button and also the ability to have the speed-dialer learn from the past to pick the most likely number to call.
1. The speed-dial function would refer to a "folder" that contains all of the potential contact numbers for a given individual.
a. Example: A unique key speed-dial folder is assigned to Sally. Sally's folder contains contact numbers for her home phone, business phone, business cell phone as well as her personal cell phone.
2. The folder would point to a preferred contact number to attempt first
a. The caller has previously assigned Sally's personal cell phone number as the default preferred contact number
3. The caller presses the unique key speed-dial that points to the party to be called folder
a. The device would programmatically dial the preferred contact number in the folder. e.g. If the caller was calling Sally, it would begin the attempted calling sequence by dialing her personal cell phone.
4. If the desired contact was not made during the attempted call e.g. answering service, no answer, the subsequent key press of the same unique speed-dial key assigned to the contact party would programmatically move to the next contact number in the folder.
5. The device makes note of the month, day and time of day that the contact was made. Using heuristic learning it would, over time, apply what it has learned about a contact, and smartly select what number to call. This smart selection would then be used to override the selection that was manually made in step
2.
Example of the heuristics that would b...
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