Contact Management

It occurred to me that due to the proliferation of peoples' contact points, it could be a very useful feature to have one's PDA be able to simply (to the user) and automatically send out his message to all of his contact's electronic contact points from one message. Given text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology, the user could either dictate his message to his PDA or type it in (and maybe a combination of the two) and the PDA could convert text to speech and vice-versa, depending upon which the user entered. Then, with one click, the PDA would fax the message to all of the contact's fax numbers, email it to all the contact's email messages and phone up all the contact's phone numbers and leave it on all the contact's voicemail systems. The latter would require some user adjustment of the extensions to enter and answering system signals to negotiate. The user interface should have check boxes for the user to select the contact points to use, and the PDA should probably try the voice phone numbers first and allow the user to listen in (or have settable indices beside each selected check box so that the user can specify the attempt order). Then if the contact actually answers in person, the user could interrupt the PDA and click cancel on the rest of the process since he has actually reached his contact.
The user should be able to add as many buttons as he wishes for different modes of contact, such as contacting his contact for business purposes; each button would reflect a different subset of the selected checkboxes and orders.

Sunday Aug 21, 2005

Posted Sun Aug 21, 2005