DYNAMICALLY RECONFIGURABLE DISTRIBUTED INTERACTIVE VOICE RESPONSE SYSTEM
1 Assignment
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
The present invention is a computer system and method that manages connections between one or more data network interfaces and one or more phone interfaces. A manager process, running on a computer system having both data and phone network interfaces, receives one or more telephone calls from one or more users over one of the phone interfaces and than accesses one or more profiles associated with each of the users. These profiles have one or more service identifiers and one or more interactive response agent (IRA) identifiers associated with the respective user. A menu of the service identifiers is presented to the user. The system then looks up an agent address of one of the IRAs that is associated with the service identifier selected by the user from the menu and establishes a session with the associated IRA. Having done this a two-way communication with the associated IRA occurs during the session. In this communication, the IRA is capable of passing information to the system from one or more application servers to which the IRA is connected over one or more data networks.
10 Citations
21 Claims
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1-16. -16. (canceled)
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17. An agent to obtain information for a user from a Web site, and for use with a manager, the agent comprising:
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means for receiving a start request across an interface to establish a session; means, acting in response to receiving said start request, for sending across the interface an acknowledgement to establish the session; means, operating while the session is established, for entering a loop to receive an information request across the interface from a user for information, to obtain information from a Web site, to send the obtained information to the user, and to monitor for an end of session signal across the interface from the user; means for receiving across the interface from the user an end request to end the session; and means, acting in response to receiving said end request, for ending the session; and
wherein the user and the manager are on a first side of the Internet;the agent is on a second side of the Internet, said second side being opposite said first side; the means for receiving the request for information includes means for receiving the request for information from the user via the manager; the means for sending the acknowledgement includes means to send said acknowledgement to the manager; and the means for sending the obtained information to the user includes means for sending the obtained information to the user via the manager. - View Dependent Claims (18, 19, 20, 21)
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Specification