Abstract: An improved system and method to provide important information either, as voice, text, picture, holographic image or video from the called party to a calling party before the called party answers a telephone. The information may be a recorded voice, text, image or video message. The called party may send a voice message, for example, and send it along with a call alerting message. The voice message may be recorded beforehand. Instead of the calling party's telephone playing a ringback signal, the recorded voice message is played or a data/bearer stream is heard. The calling party hears the voice message instead of the ringback tone normally heard when there is an incoming telephone call. If the calling and called party have telephones, such as mobile phones, IP phones, IP softphones, PDA with telephony capabilities, etc., which allow for multimedia messages such as text, images and video messages, the called party's recorded voice message may include text, images or video.

Abstract: The present invention is directed generally to an information manager that identifies currently scheduled meetings satisfying selected search parameters, discloses, when permitted, details of the identified meetings to requestors, and merges requested and existing meetings when appropriate.

Abstract: A method and apparatus provide feedback of facial expressions of participants during communication by capturing facial expressions of participants; extracting facial information from the captured facial expressions; transmitting the extracted facial information to communication terminals; and displaying the transmitted facial information by the communication terminals in a symbolic form.

Abstract: The present invention is directed toward a method and system for determining changes in a customer that have occurred between contact center visits. The invention is operable to compare data captured from a previous interaction and data captured from a current interaction and compare the two in order to determine if the customer has had any changes to their appearance or otherwise since their last contact center visit.

Abstract: An integrated communications system is provided wherein video conferencing is conducted and participants sharing a video resource may be identified. Application of the present invention is particularly suited for videoconferencing when there are a plurality of communication endpoints, and at least one of the communication endpoints includes multiple participants at the shared video resource. A video or audio processing technique takes place to identify locations of conference participants at the communication endpoints. Each participant has an assigned RFID identifier during the conference. The RFID identifiers are interrogated by an RFID reader that downloads data from the identifiers to the system. The gathered RFID data is then matched with the processed video or audio data in order to identify each of the conference participants. A user interface is provided to allow the participants to view the other remote participants along with the identifying data of the remote participants.

Abstract: A method and apparatus control the use of transmission bandwidth by detecting a change in presentation of a video picture on a receiving telecommunication terminal; transmitting the detected change to a transmitting telecommunication terminal; and adjusting the transmission rate of the video picture in response to the detected change by the transmitting telecommunication terminal.

Abstract: The present invention is directed generally to an information manager that identifies currently scheduled meetings satisfying selected search parameters, discloses, when permitted, details of the identified meetings to requestors, and merges requested and existing meetings when appropriate.

Abstract: A video telecommunications system 100 for effecting a communication between at least first and second participants including an image alteration agent 358 that (i) removes desired and/or undesired image information 370 and 374 from the acquired image information 362 to form filtered image information 378 and the removed information and (ii) combines the filtered image information 378 and/or the image information 370 and 374 with substitute image information 382 to form composite image information 366; and a video communication infrastructure 304 that transmits the composite image information 366 to a communication device associated with the second participant 120. The composite image information 366 excludes undesired image information 374.