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US 8,942,357 B2Granted
Stopping robocalls
OwnerMary Elizabeth Gouletinventor
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A robocall is prevented from reaching a telephone subscriber, by an automated calling screening system that tests for presence of a human caller on the line, and disconnects calls absent a predetermined response indicating presence of a human caller.
Claims6
A method of preventing a robocall from reaching a telephone subscriber, comprising:
- An automated system pretesting a question against other system, wherein the other system comprising a voice recognition system, for whether the question is machine-answerable;
- the automated system playing the question and analyzing a response;
- if the response is not the expected answer, the automated system designates the question machine-unanswerable and adding the question to a set of stored questions to be asked by the automated system;
- before an incoming telephone call is permitted to ring through to a telephone subscriber, pre-answering the incoming call, performed by the automated system;
- delivering an audio message which a human caller would be likely to be able to answer successfully but would be likely to be unanswerable by a non-human;
- wherein the audio message comprises a message along the lines of “this telephone subscriber does not receive robocalls;
- are you a human caller?”;
- disconnecting the incoming call unless the automated system receives a predetermined response pattern;
- processing the incoming call for ring-through to the telephone subscriber if and only the predetermined response pattern has been received by the automated system.
6 more elements
A method of preventing a robocall from reaching a telephone subscriber, comprising:
- An automated system pretesting a question against other system, wherein the other system comprising a voice recognition system, for whether the question is machine-answerable;
- the automated system playing the question and analyzing a response;
- if the response is not the expected answer, the automated system designates the question machine-unanswerable and adding the question to a set of stored questions to be asked by the automated system;
- before an incoming telephone call is permitted to ring through to a telephone subscriber, pre-answering the incoming call, performed by the automated system;
- delivering an audio message which a human caller would be likely to be able to answer successfully but would be likely to be unanswerable by a non-human;
- comprising culture-based questioning, wherein the audio message comprises a culture-based question;
- disconnecting the incoming call unless the automated system receives a predetermined response pattern;
- processing the incoming call for ring-through to the telephone subscriber if and only the predetermined response pattern has been received by the automated system.
5 more elements
A method of preventing a robocall from reaching a telephone subscriber, comprising:
- An automated system pretesting a question against other system, wherein the other system comprising a voice recognition system, for whether the question is machine-answerable;
- the automated system playing the question and analyzing a response;
- if the response is not the expected answer, the automated system designates the question machine-unanswerable and adding the question to a set of stored questions to be asked by the automated system;
- wherein the stored questions are in a form of prerecorded audio, recorded by a variety of different individuals speaking with different accents and/or dialects;
- before an incoming telephone call is permitted to ring through to a telephone subscriber, pre-answering the incoming call, performed by the automated system;
- delivering an audio message which a human caller would be likely to be able to answer successfully but would be likely to be unanswerable by a non-human;
- disconnecting the incoming call unless the automated system receives a predetermined response pattern;
- processing the incoming call for ring-through to the telephone subscriber if and only the predetermined response pattern has been received by the automated system.
5 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.