Telelogue Secures Directory Assistance Patent

ISELIN, NJ - Telelogue Inc., a provider of speech automated directory assistance (DA) services for telecommunications providers, announced that it received its U.S. patent relating to the effective, efficient and robust searching of large databases. "We believe that any speech automated directory assistance solution sufficient to satisfy the minimum customer requirements will require either a license from us under one or more of our patents or many years of research and development in search of a satisfactory alternative solution," said Robert W. Burke, Telelogue's chief executive officer. "We intend to pursue a thoughtful strategy of maximizing the value of our intellectual property independent of our own delivery of products and services." The patent, "Method and Apparatus for Automatically Processing a User's Communication," creates an approach that matches the speech of a caller with database listings in a very fast timeframe with high accuracy. The alternative approach results in a delay of 10-15 seconds even in databases of only 20,000 entries. The DA database that includes the five boroughs of New York City contains approximately 500,000 business listings, and the entire U.S. database includes more than 20 million business listings and 120 million residential listings. By establishing patents in several key areas highly relevant to directory assistance automation, Telelogue has created a patent thicket that provides the company with a unique competitive advantage not only with respect to database search methodology but also DA listing preprocessing, nightly DA listing database updates and next generation grammar creation.