A Phone That Answers When Called
From: Today's Headlines from NYTimes.com - 12/30/2002
By: Sabra Chartrand

Phone systems today commonly include features like caller identification,
call waiting and automatic redial. But what is the point of all the bells and
whistles if you cannot get to a ringing phone in time to answer it?  

It has happened to everyone. Your work phone rings when you are deep in
paperwork or have just taken a bite of lunch. The home phone rings when you
are in the shower or have just started up the stairs. You cannot pick up the
receiver before the caller gives up or the answering machine clicks on.  

It happened to David Millrod more times than he could count. So he invented
and patented a phone that can be answered with a verbal command.  

A user can shout, "Answer phone!" from across the room, and the phone will
open the line and play a message telling the caller to hold on until the user
can pick up the call.  

"The whole process of calling my voice-mail system, listening to the message
left, then calling the person back and hoping to reach them, all because I
got there two seconds late, became really annoying," remembered Mr. Millrod,
the founder of a Web-site consulting company in West Windsor, NJ.  

He tried adding more rings to his system, "but then all sorts of people
started to complain that voice mail never answered, that it just rings and
rings." 

"It occurred to me that the telephone relies on sound," he said. "I can hear
it, so then it can hear me." 

He began working on a prototype with a simple chip, but quickly realized that
voice-recognition technologies would not suit his idea. "They're too
expensive and too error-prone; you have to train them and have it set up for
every person in the house," he said. Instead, he devised a system that
recognizes cadence and tone. He settled on a phrase with distinct spaces
between the syllables and words so a person would not accidentally answer a
ringing phone just by speaking in its vicinity.  

The likelihood that a user would inadvertently say the phrase while the phone
was ringing was relatively low, he explained.  

"At this point, the phrase is `answer phone,' " he said, adding that his
device recognizes the distinct sounds and silences of varying lengths.  

"There's sort of a cadence to the phrase that is there even at a distance of
10, 15, 20 or 25 feet away," he said. "Whereas experts in voice-recognition
chips all told me that the person would have to be six inches away from the
microphone." 

Mr. Millrod's system could be programmed to recognize dozens of commands. He
said it could hear a command from any distance where "a person standing next
to the phone could hear you." 

He has a sandwich-size prototype installed on his own phone.  

"Right now, the way it works, the phone rings, you say a command, and then
you hear a sort of electronic sound, a beep, in your home, so you know it
heard you," he said. "The phone stops ringing. Then the person who is calling
hears what sounds like an answering machine pick up and a message saying,
`I'll be right there - give me a minute to get to the phone.' " 

In his patent, Mr. Millrod cites a couple of earlier inventions designed to
solve the same problem, including one for a remote control that a person
could carry around to answer a phone from a distance. But like all remote
controls, this one can be misplaced. Mr. Millrod also points out that if
there are visitors in the house, "it is impractical to outfit all of them
with remote control devices." 

He also mentioned a speakerphone system "which answers incoming calls if it
detects a sequence of hand claps." But that, he said, does not help if a
user's hands are full or if someone does not have "the physical skill
required to clap loudly enough in the correct pattern." 

Finally, he said, even though the claps can be used to answer the phone, the
user still has to "begin the conversation immediately," a disadvantage if
someone is stuck in the shower.  

"The most important use would be for people for whom this is more than a
once-a-week phenomenon but in fact a real source of anxiety, like the
elderly, or anyone temporarily or permanently physically slowed down," Mr.
Millrod said.  

But he would eventually like to see his device offered in stores and
catalogs, where, he said, it should sell for under $20. Mr. Millrod won
patent number 6,483,897.  

For many people, convergence means the blending of television and computers.
To Chul Woo Lee, it is creating a cellphone that includes a TV remote
control.  

Mr. Lee, who lives in Seoul, South Korea, won a patent last month for such a
device. The phone can be used as a TV remote control and for conversations at
the same time. Messages indicating that there is an incoming phone call or a
voice-mail message can pop up on the TV screen. Mr. Lee won patent number
6,487,422.  

Since fraud is a big problem in the telecommunications industry, two
inventors at Iridian Technologies in Moorestown, NJ, may have come up with
a way to stop unauthorized users from making cellphone calls.  

The inventors, Clyde Musgrave and James Cambier, have patented a hand-held
scanner that matches images of the eye's iris to preapproved iris images
stored in the phone. The scanner has a camera to take a picture of the iris.  

"The telecommunications device cannot be unlocked and used unless a user has
been identified and authorized by the imager," the inventors write in their
patent. Mr. Musgrave and Mr. Cambier won patent number 6,483,930.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/30/technology/30PATE.html?ex=1042528887&ei=1&en=4252794347ef7aec

Contributed by: Marsha Allen