Telephonic communications – Audio message storage – retrieval – or synthesis – Message management
Reexamination Certificate
1999-10-08
2003-06-10
Weaver, Scott L. (Department: 2645)
Telephonic communications
Audio message storage, retrieval, or synthesis
Message management
C379S088170, C379S201030
Reexamination Certificate
active
06577713
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a telephone survey creation method. In particular, there is a method of creating a telephone survey, by a non-technical person, using a single web site and an audio responsive system like a telephone.
2. Description of the Related Art
The background art shows a variety of methods for creating and designing telephone surveys. For example, market survey data collection systems are well known in the art. One of the more common prior art systems for collecting such data involves the use of survey booklets or questionnaires that are disseminated by mail to a diverse group of panelists. The survey is individually hand written into by the panelists to record the survey data relating to their particular shopping habits for various identified products. Thereby, it is mailed back to the survey company by the panelist where the data is then key punched and ultimately read into a data processor or computer for accumulative processing of all of this data. This procedure, although satisfactory under some circumstances, is time consuming, costly and provides many opportunities for erroneous data entry due to carelessness either by the panelist who is writing in the data by hand or by the keypunch operator who is subsequently encoding the hand written data.
Various business, governmental, and media-based organizations often find it desirable to obtain reliable and timely data representative of opinion in regard to some question of local, regional, or national interest. Typically, the question of interest is broadcast via the transmitter of a television or radio station and individuals in the station audience are invited to express their opinion in regard to the matter by the use of their telephone sets. Telephone-based audience survey systems are called upon to handle a high caller volume at a relatively low cost in a manner that insures wide audience acceptability and that provides highly reliable data.
Presently available telephone-based audience survey systems are expensive and labor intensive. Where the survey is conducted manually by operators or the like, it is not only costly but slow. Where such surveys have been conducted by the telephone company, two separate telephone numbers are required for the participant and the information as to the results must be obtained from an office of the telephone company.
Newer computer-based systems have been developed because of the high costs in soliciting questions. For example, touch-tone phone systems are well known and extend throughout the world. Such systems have been used for normal telephone conversations and as datasets but have only recently achieved their full utilization as a communications interface. Specifically, recent systems act as verbally interactive telephone interrogation systems using a conventional two-way telephone subscriber network to enable individual subscriber selection of telephone messages with which the subscriber may individually interact and to which the subscriber may respond and have the response recorded or accumulated in an automatic telephone survey. This system has become popular for purposes of polling or interrogation, such as the cable TV system known as QUBE.
Examples of patents related to the present invention are as follows, and each patent is herein incorporated by reference for the supporting teachings:
U.S. Pat. No. 4,320,256, is an improved verbally interactive telephone interrogation system. It provides a two-way telephone subscriber network, such as a touch-tone type two-way telephone subscriber network, is used to enable both telephone call placement and individualized remote variable audio message selection and interrogation of prerecorded audio messages as well as remote response accumulation. The touch-tone type telephone, which is employed to maintain normal telephone contact with other subscribers, is also utilized to call-up a multi track magnetic storage device that provides selectable reproducible conversational responsive audio messages to particular conversational responsive audio messages to particular primary reproducible interrogatory message from a plurality of different selectable audio messages stored thereon.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,355,372 is a method for independently electronically collecting related market survey data from a plurality of diverse locations (
6
,
6
′) for temporary storage
20
at each of the independent diverse locations (
6
,
6
′) where the data is collected for subsequent transmission thereof from these locations (
6
,
6
′) over a telephone type link (
30
,
36
,
42
) for accumulative processing thereof at a remote central electronic data processor. An interactive interchangeable prompt message display is displayed on a visual display device (
32
) indicating one of a plurality of market survey categories in a predefined sequence. An actual data input signal may be provided via a keyboard (
70
) or barboard (
29
) and/or wand (
18
,
28
) in response to the prompt message display with this input being stored in a memory (
16
) for subsequent transmission. Prior to storage in the memory (
16
), the data is stored in a buffer and is displayed on the display device (
32
) to enable confirmation prior to transfer to the bulk memory (
16
). When a confirmation command signal is provided to the microcomputer (
10
,
12
,
14
) the data is transferred to the bulk memory (
16
) and the display (
32
) is changed to display the next prompt message in the sequence. The sequence recycles for each market transaction for enabling independent integral storage (
16
) of each product transaction at the location of the unit (
6
,
6
′). This stored data is then transmitted to the remote data processor via acoustic coupling (
30
,
36
,
42
) to the telephone line.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,451,700 is a telephone based automatic audience survey system for polling an audience to obtain data representative of the opinion regarding a question of interest is disclosed having a first means responsive to incoming calls for answering the calls with an analog voice signal that both identifies the telephone based automatic audience survey system and queries a response in regard to the question of interest, and a second means connected to the first means and responsive to the answers provided to the query portions of the analog voice signal for providing data representative of the consensus regarding the question of interest. Third means connected to the second means are operative to display the data in real-time. The third means includes a video character generator, an audio signal generator, and an operator display.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,603,232 is a method for independently centrally electronically accumulating market survey data from different content rapidly disseminated multiple inquiry market surveys from a plurality of panelist stations (
14
,
16
,
18
,
20
) located at diverse locations. Variable market survey questionnaires to diverse located panelists may be as remotely rapidly disseminated from a centrally located host computer (
12
) to the panelist stations (
14
,
16
,
18
,
20
) over a common communications link (
22
or
104
) for individual visual display at the panelist stations (
14
,
16
,
18
,
20
), such as on a CRT (
42
) or television set (
44
) or alphanumeric display (
45
), with the displayed questionnaires resulting from a downstream loaded set of control instructions stored in a local survey program RAM (
54
) whose content may be remotely varied from the head end or host computer (
12
). The individualized responses provided by the panelists are locally processed (
34
,
50
) temporarily stored in a local survey data RAM (
52
) and subsequently transmitted back to the host computer (
12
) via a telephone type link (
22
) where they are accumulatively processed in a rapid fashion. Multiple different surveys can be downstream loaded to individual panelists, or to a subgroup of panelists, or to all panelists, and follow up surveys and/or tailored surveys can also be rapidly conducted, all und
Mann Richard G.
Peterson Curtis M.
iQuest Technologies, Inc.
Thorpe North & Western L.L.P.
Weaver Scott L.
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