Social network based type-ahead dialing for phone systems (04-Nov-2009)

Social network based type-ahead dialing for phone systems

Today, more and more organizations are moving away from traditional Private Branch Exchange (PBX) systems to Virtual PBX solutions that integrate telephony with computer systems and can utilize packet switching networks. A common feature found in the traditional PBX solutions is name dialling where a person can call another person by typing the callee's name into a phone device. This is performed by using the phone's alphanumeric keypad and typing in letters instead of numbers. The PBX system stores aliases between a person's name and the assigned phone-number that person has so that when name dialling is used the PBX can connect the call to the telephone number that corresponds to the callee's name. This is a convenient method of dialling phone numbers without the need to know or memorize the callee's phone number. However there exists a fundamental problem with the older systems which can be solved by the computing capabilities introduced by modern telephone exchange systems.

Use case

With traditional PBX systems if for example the caller wants to dial Jonathan Doe and the organization has one hundred persons with the first name Jonathan then the caller has to type in the first name and then a part or whole of the callee's surname before the PBX will be able to match the name to a telephone record. This is very inconvenient to the callers which have to type in a large number of characters before the PBX can match the typed name to one of the stored aliases. And moreover this increases the load on the PBX since it has to go through a very large number of records each time a caller types in a letter.

Implementation

The invention will be implemented by constructing the callers' social network based on the persons that each caller had previously collaborated with over the phone. This social network structure will be constructed a...