Telephonic communications – Telephone line or system combined with diverse electrical... – Having transmission of a digital message signal over a...
Reexamination Certificate
2002-10-23
2004-05-25
Woo, Stella (Department: 2643)
Telephonic communications
Telephone line or system combined with diverse electrical...
Having transmission of a digital message signal over a...
C379S090010, C370S352000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06741681
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of data acquisition from Internet sites and data communication to Internet sites using a predetermined data communication format. The data acquired from the Internet sites are automatically transformed into speech and communicated by speech telephony to users. Similarly, the data communicated to Internet sites is transformed from speech into a predetermined data communication format and transmitted to the Internet site for use by the Internet server. For example, telephonic participation in an Internet auction is possible using the above method.
2. Description of Related Art
The present invention relates to a method for acquisition of data provided on and Internet site and for data communication to an Internet site in a predetermined data communication format, the Internet site being maintained on an Internet server.
Presently, any document available on the Internet that may be displayed and observed using a suitable program, such as a browser, is to be considered an Internet site. Programs for displaying and observing Internet sites of the type under discussion may be used on vastly different devices, such as typical personal computers (PCs), mobile telephones (cellular phones), and handhelds or PDAs (personal digital assistants). The programs used on the individual devices for displaying and viewing the Internet sites are then, of course, different from one another, as are the display and transmission standards used. One example of these configurations is that of a typical personal computer, connected to the Internet via a DSL line. Using this personal computer, an Internet site is accessedvia the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet site being essentially in HTML code and JavaScript. Internet sites accessible using a WAP cellular phone must correspondingly be in WML format. The same is true for devices and formats recently available, such as XML.
A similar state of affairs to that described above in relation to the acquisition of data provided on an Internet site also applies for data communication to an Internet site. Data communication to an Internet site corresponds to data communication to the Internet server upon which the Internet site is maintained. The computer process the Internet site is based on or other data on the Internet server may be changed or supplemented. The most frequently used procedure is one where fields in a form are filled out using the keyboard of a personal computer, and these fields are displayed to the user of the personal computer. The data input by the user using the keyboard is then processed further or at least stored as a function of the title of the field in the Internet server.
The above method is problematic in that an Internet-capable device must always be provided to exchange data in alphanumerical and numerical forms to effect the acquisition of data provided by an Internet site and to effect the communication of data to an Internet site. A bidirectional Internet-capable device using a connection to the Internet is typically employed. However, this leads to the user being excluded from access to the Internet when no such Internet-capable device is available to him. The user is thereby unable to access important data displayed on a specific Internet site and is unable to communicate data to a specific Internet site during this time.
Such problems may particularly occur and may be very serious if the user participates in an Internet auction and the close of the Internet auction occurs at a time when the user has no access to an Internet-capable device as described above. The user may then possibly be outbid shortly before the end of Internet auction, without being able to react to this outbidding by increasing his own offer.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
An object of the present invention is to provide a method for data acquisition of data provided by an Internet site and a similar method for data communication to an Internet site, where universal access to the Internet site is achieved, even without an Internet-capable device.
To achieve this object, the method employed according to the present invention is distinguished from the prior art in that the data provided by the Internet site is automatically transformed at least partially into speech. The data transformed into speech is the communicated by a speech telephony connection between a server-side speech telephony device and a remote speech telephony device of a user. The user is automatically offered data communication by speech telephony connection between a remote speech telephony device of the user and a server-side speech telephony device using acoustic signals input by the user. The acoustic signals input by the user are automatically converted into the predetermined data communication format and are communicated to the Internet site in this predetermined data communication format.
An essential point of the method according to the present invention is the bidirectional communication of data using speech telephony. On the user side, only a telephone, such as a fixed network telephone or a mobile telephone, must be supplied.
In the present invention, speech telephony means such a connection, using a telephone or other device in which acoustic signals, that is, particularly the spoken word, are communicated, as distinguished from a modem or fax connection. However, speech telephony also includes the communication of artificially generated tones, such as DTMF dial tones. In principle, speech telephony may also be Internet telephony, the method according to the present invention being of limited advantage for an existing typical Internet access.
In the method according to the present invention, the Internet site from which the data for data acquisition is provided and the Internet site to which data is to be communicated may be identical, but this is not absolutely necessary. The method according to the present invention is therefore usable for a case in which the Internet site providing the data provided is different from the Internet site to which the data is to be communicated.
Finally, it is to be noted that the transformation into speech of the data provided on the Internet site according to the present invention amounts to reading aloud parts of the Internet site. For this purpose, a parsing, that is, reading in the data of interest on Internet site, and conversion of the data, which is generally in a text format, such as HTML, into speech is necessary. Corresponding devices and methods to perform this parsing are well known from the related art. The transformation of the data from the Internet site into speech is novel.
In principle, the format of the data provided on Internet site might be restricted to a predetermined format, so that a fixed conversion of the Internet site having the provided data into speech may be employed. However, according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention, the format of the data provided by the Internet site is recognized automatically and conversion of this data into speech is performed as a function of its automatically recognized format. In this way, universal use of the method according to the present invention is possible.
For the transformation of the data provided on the Internet site into speech, two alternative preferred embodiments of the present invention are provided. Specifically, according to a first preferred embodiment of the present invention, the transformation of the data provided by the Internet site into speech is carried out by the Internet server itself. In this manner, in addition to access to the Internet site in its corresponding format, direct access to the original data upon which the Internet site is based on and upon the original process which the Internet site is based is possible. This is particularly advantageous in regard to the conversion speed of alphanumeric data and corresponding speech data. In addition to numerical or alphanumeric data, corresponding speech information data may be stored in parallel on the I
mediaBEAM GmbH
Nixon & Peabody LLP
Safran David S.
Woo Stella
LandOfFree
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