PERSONAL TELEPHONE AGENT

A personal telephone messaging agent can automate routine scheduling, coordinating and information gathering tasks while maintaining the advantages inherent in the telephone system. A person specifies a message and, optionally, some specific questions, and a list of recipients to his or her personal messaging agent. The messaging agent delivers the message to and collects a response from each messaging recipient using the telephone system. When each intended recipient has been reached, the agent contacts the sender to report the results or, optionally, the agent could undertake routine tasks such as scheduling a meeting based upon the responses and assigning a conference room for the meeting. An even more sophisticated personal telephone agent may be employed in the context of an information retrieval service. An IVR system has an interface designed for people to use. However, the databases of information that an IVR system draws upon could be accessed over the telephone network by an automated agent using an interface designed for agent access. In this way, a messaging agent can be used to retrieve the desired information and report back to the caller. The personal telephone messaging system of the present invention can be applied to tasks such as scheduling a meeting, confirming a decision, determining the price of an item, and finding flight information.