System and method of non-spoken telephone communication

Details System and method of non-spoken telephone communication System and method of non-spoken telephone communication

1999-09-16

2002-12-03

Ramakrishnaiah, Melur (Department: 2643)

Telephonic communications

Including aid for handicapped user

C379S093170, C379S088240

Reexamination Certificate

active

06490343

ABSTRACT:

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to communication systems, methods and programs, and more particularly to use of a vocabulary formed using telephone keypad symbols to allow non-spoken communication by telephone.
2. Description of the Related Art
The following descriptions and examples are not admitted to be prior art by virtue of their inclusion within this section.
Communication by telephone has permeated business and social interaction to the point that a telephone is widely considered a necessity. Spoken communication by telephone is generally found to be natural and convenient by users. In some situations, however, spoken communication may be inconvenient or even impossible. For example, hearing-impaired people are generally unable to participate in conventional spoken telephone conversations. Those who have difficulty speaking or are unable to speak (as a result, for example, of congenital problems, illness or injury) have similar problems with telephone usage. Telephone users without hearing or speech impairments may also encounter difficulty with spoken communication in certain circumstances. For example, when a telephone user is located in a very loud environment (such as, e.g., a train station), both participants in the conversation may have difficulty hearing the conversation over the surrounding noise. In other environments, such as during artistic performances, the sound of a person talking on a telephone creates an undesirable distraction for others.
Efforts to enable telephone usage for hearing or speech-impaired persons have long been underway. An older approach which is still relatively common is the use of a teletypewriter, or TTY device. Such a TTY device, also known as a “telecommunication device for the deaf”, or TDD, is connected to the telephone of the hearing-impaired person, who communicates by typing onto a keyboard associated with the TDD and reading messages from an associated display. A TDD device must also be used by the person communicating with the hearing-impaired person. If a telephone with a TDD device is not available, a call can be completed by using a TDD relay service. For example, a conventional telephone user may call a TDD relay service, whereupon an operator uses a TDD to contact the TDD of the hearing-impaired person. Use of a human operator in such a relay service is known as “voice carry-over” (VCO). Similarly, a hearing-impaired person may use a TDD to call a telephone number advertised by, for example, a business or government agency to reach a TDD relay service which then contacts the business by conventional telephone.
Use of VCO requires including a third person (the relay operator) in every telephone conversation, thereby compromising the privacy of the conversation. A system which allows TDD communication with an automated interactive menu system (such as may be used by, e.g., financial institutions or airlines in order to supply customer information without employing a human representative) has been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,121,421 to Alheim. This system includes a means for sending the menu prompts used by the interactive menu system to the TDD device of the hearing-impaired person for display, and receiving signals transmitted by the hearing-impaired person in response to the menu prompts, so that a human relay operator is not needed.
TDD devices transmit characters across a telephone line using coded tone signals. One such code is called Baudot, and ASCII coding may also be used. Other approaches to telephone communication for hearing-impaired users involve transmission of the dual-tone-multi-frequency (DTMF) tones used by a “touch-tone” telephone. The set of DTMF signals typically used in telephone communications includes 12 tones, each tone a sum of tones of two frequencies. One of these two frequencies is from a group of four low-frequency tones, having frequencies form 697 Hz to 941 Hz. Each low-frequency tone is associated with one of the four rows of keys within a touch-tone telephone keypad. The other component of each DTMF tone has a frequency from a group of three high-frequency tones, ranging in frequency from 1209 Hz to 1477 Hz. Each high-frequency tone is associated with one of the three columns in the keypad. Pressing a key results in a specific combination of the corresponding row and column frequencies to produce the tone specific to that key.
In an article by Kraft in
Circuit Cellar
INK®, October 1997, p. 18, a DTMF message decoder and display for use with the telephone of a hearing-impaired person is described. The decoder detects incoming sequences of DTMF tones sent by a standard touch-tone telephone in communication with the telephone of the hearing-impaired person, and displays an alphanumeric character corresponding to each tone sequence on the display so that a message may be read by the hearing-impaired person. Messages are sent to the decoder one letter at a time using a scheme in which multiple key presses are used to distinguish between the different letters associated with each key on the telephone keypad. For example, two presses of the “2” key in rapid succession are interpreted as the letter “B”. Another system for converting DTMF tones to alphanumeric characters in a message display for a hearing-impaired telephone user is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,426,555 to Underkoffler. In this system, the numerals one through nine are each sent by pressing the corresponding key on the telephone keypad once, while other characters such as letters and punctuation marks are sent using two-key sequences.
The above-described systems which display messages formed from characters sent using DTMF codes each require multiple key presses to be used to form most characters, a requirement which may make communication excessively time-consuming, tedious, and prone to error. A different approach to a DTMF decoding system, described in a paper by Shennib and Kondraske in
Frontiers of Engineering and Computing in Health Care—
1984:
Proceedings—Sixth Annual Conference, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society,
allows transmission of words using a single keystroke for each letter of a word. A word is entered into the sending telephone by pressing in sequence the keys corresponding to the letters of the word, so that a numeric code is entered. The most likely word corresponding to the particular numeric code entered is then determined using an algorithm which compares portions of the numeric code to stored data including commonly-used syllables and corresponding numeric codes.
Although the system of Shennib and Kondraske allows a character in a message to be transmitted with a single keystroke rather than multiple keystrokes, all of the above-described approaches require sending messages one character at a time, making communication relatively slow. It would therefore be desirable to develop a system and method to allow more rapid non-spoken communication by telephone.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The problems outlined above are in large part addressed by a system and method for assigning a short code to each of a set of message units stored in memory within a code-compatible telephone. The message units may be alphanumeric or non-alphanumeric. An alphanumeric information unit preferably includes multiple alphanumeric characters, and may include a word, phrase, or message. For example, a code may be assigned to a particular written message, which may contain one or more sentences. Circuitry and/or software in the telephone is adapted to detect such an incoming code and display the corresponding message on the telephone's display screen. Codes corresponding to phrases or words may also be sent sequentially to create messages, so that a message unit may comprise part of a message. A non-alphanumeric message unit may be a unit of graphic information, such as an icon or image. This graphic information is also forwarded to the telephone's display screen if the corresponding code is received by the telephone. Alternatively, a non-alphanumeric message unit ma

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