FR2825227A1 - Electronic mail exchange facility for mobile phones, have phonic signal storage area/electronic mail storage area integrated sharing common transducer/loudspeaker connections. - Google Patents

Abstract

The electronic mail exchange facility has a unit (140) exchanging electronic mail with digital word field sequences. The phonic signals are stored (13,143,144) in a unit connected to a transducer (19,20) so that the electronic mail area can access the connected units also.

Description

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The present invention relates to mobile radiotelephony terminals which are provided for exchanging electronic mails.

For this purpose, mobile terminals include electronic mail exchange software for composing a message from the telephone keypad, possibly in association with message composition assistance software, which offers possible words on the screen. from the first letters entered.

The screen also allows the reading of received messages.

However, and although the keyboard and the screen are used, on the one hand, for the purely phonic or sound function and, on the other hand, for the electronic mail function, these two functions remain used separately.

Thus, when the mail received includes an attachment containing data from a sound sequence, the terminal cannot restore it. Conversely, the emission of such an audio attachment is impossible.

The present invention aims to better integrate these two functions in a radiotelephony terminal.

To this end, the invention relates first of all to a radiotelephone terminal comprising means for exchanging electronic mails, each mail comprising an attachment data field, a terminal characterized by the fact that it includes storage means. of phonic signals, arranged to connect transducer means of phonic communication, intended for a user, to the means for exchanging electronic mails and arranged to access the attachment field.

Thus, the attachment field is accessible to the user through the storage means, such as answering machine and / or recorder and the transducing means of voice communication, such as microphone and / or speaker, respectively.

The invention also relates to a method for transmitting phonic signals between two answering and recording terminals of a radiotelephone network transmitting electronic mails, characterized in that

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 - a sound sequence is recorded in the answering machine-recorder of one of the transmitting terminals, - the sequence is coded as an attachment in an electronic mail which is transmitted to the other terminal and - in the receiving terminal , the attachment is received and stored in the answering machine-recorder for delayed sound reproduction.

The invention will be better understood with the aid of the following description of a preferred embodiment of a radio terminal according to the invention, shown diagrammatically in the appended single figure, implementing the method of the invention.

The radio terminal, bearing the reference 1, is connected to the GSM cellular radio network 40, of which a conventional mobile terminal 41 is shown.

In this example, to the GSM network 40 are also connected, through a computer network 30 which is here the Internet, a mail server 32, constituting an electronic mail mailbox of the terminal 1, and a server 33 provided to process attachment fields belonging to e-mail messages in IP format.

It will be recalled that the attachment field of an IP electronic mail is intended to receive and encapsulate a file of any format, even incompatible with the text format of Internet mail 30, file which is transmitted without any analysis of its content. The receiving terminal can, for example, extract image data from it, such as faxes, or even sound or sound signal data. It is the latter case that the present invention deals with.

The terminal 1 comprises a time base 10 which punctuates the operation of the various circuits thereof and in particular a microprocessor 11 for managing these circuits, connected to a keyboard 28 and controlling a display screen 29. Radio circuits 12 connect terminal 1 to the GSM network 40, in particular for establishing conventional telephone and voice communications, and exchanging electronic mails. The radio circuits 12 are connected to a responder-recorder block 13 for storing phonic signals, with permanent and random access memory, and to a messaging block 14, for processing and storing mail messages.

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electronic, received from or sent to the GSM 40 network. Circuits 17, with three bi-directional phonic signal routing channels, are controlled by the microprocessor II to connect electrical signal-acoustic signal transducers, namely a microphone
19 and a loudspeaker 20, directly to the radio circuits 12, by a first channel, or else to a so-called internal side of the answering-recording machine 13, by a second channel. The third channel connects the transducers 19, 20 to the messaging block 14.

As explained below, the answering machine-recorder 13, which conventionally stores sound signals of an incoming voice call, can also store sound signals reproduced from attachment data of an electronic mail received or intended for a mail. to emit.

In this example, the responder-recorder 13, with digital memory, is designed to store speech data coded by a vocoder of a remote station 41, or, internally, by a vocoder 21 associated with the microphone 19, and is in parallel connected at the output, always on the internal side, to a synthesizer 22 controlling the loudspeaker 20.

An electronic mail has a header field with in particular service signals or data indicating the position of the electronic text field in the message and indicating, if necessary, the presence of an attachment field and his position. We can therefore read the desired field, after reading the header field.

For the sake of clarity, we have drawn, in the messaging block 14, three memory zones, 141, 142, 143 provided for the respective storage of the header, text and attachment fields. A block 140 of circuits for ordering and exchanging mail, managing mail and in particular analyzing and addressing mail, or even providing logical links between fields of the same mail, is provided for reading. the header field of any mail received to be processed and to provide the two respective physical address fields of the other two fields, text and attachment, in fields 142 and 143.

References 141 to 143 therefore designate functional sets of fields of particular types, these three sets being in practice physically stored in the same memory block and being logically separated or differentiated by the control and exchange circuits 140 which

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 manage the physical addresses of the memories.

Subsequently, the references 141 to 143 put in parentheses designate the contents of these respective memory areas, that is to say the contents of the corresponding field of an electronic mail.

A software block 15, for IP electronic mail messaging, is associated with the microprocessor 11 to manage the messaging block 14. A block 16 here links the radio circuits 12 to the block 140 and allows in particular the exchange of short SMS messages.

By the drawn bus, common to all the circuits of block 14, and through a block 144 of bidirectional access link circuits and here a block 18 of coding-decoding (codec) of phonic signals, the block of attachments 143 is connected to the transponder-recorder 13 and to the transducers 19, 20 through the third channel of the switching circuits 17.

The connection block 144 cooperates with the control and exchange block 140 so that any one of them reads attachment data written by the other and retransmits them respectively internally, to the transducers 19,20 , and externally, to the radio circuits 12.

The operation of terminal 1 will now be explained in more detail.

The transducers, microphone 19 and loudspeaker 20, can be connected, in a generally bi-directional manner, to the radio circuits 12 by the three channels of the routing circuits 17, the last two channels involving the messaging function.

The first channel conventionally connects the transducers 19, 20 directly to the radio circuits 12, when the user of the terminal 1 calls a correspondent or accepts an incoming call for phonic communication. The answering machine-recorder 13 is then in parallel and can, if desired, be activated to record the conversation.

By the second channel, the answering-recording machine 13 is interposed between the radio circuits 12 and the transducers 19, 20 to store the phonic signals of a conventional incoming telephone call, on the so-called external side of the answering-recording machine 13, or to store a welcome message to

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 incoming calls.

The transponder-recorder 13 is also connected, by another external side, to the radio circuits 12 by a messaging path, and precisely by the messaging block 14 and the codec 18.

By the third channel, the transducers 19,20 directly access the messaging path 14,18, bypassing the answering machine-recorder 13.

When an e-mail message, coming from a PC connected to the Internet 30 or from the terminal 41 for example, is received by the radio circuits 12, possibly by reading the mailbox in the server 32, it is transmitted to the messaging block 14 to be stored there and analyzed by the command and exchange block 140.

When an attachment field (143) is detected, and when the header data (141) or attachment field data (143) indicate, by their format or by service signals, that it is a sequence of phonic signals, the link block 144 reads the data of phonic signals, generally vocal, of the attachment field (143) and transmits them to codec 18, functioning as digital decoder / analog, directly connected to the transducers 19,20 through the third channel of the switching circuits 17.

The codec 18 can be provided for decoding phonic signals digitized in a conventional manner by amplitude sampling by bytes at 8 kHz, therefore at a bit rate of 64 kb / s. It will be noted that the restitution rate, 64 kb / s, can be higher than the rate of the radio circuits 12, for example as here 9.6 kb / s, since it is a restitution after storage, in deferred time and not in real time, offline. The quality of restitution of an attachment can therefore be better than the standard telephone quality, corresponding to a quality of synthesizer. The codec 18 can also be provided to function as a synthesizer when it receives phonic signals from a portable telephone 21 with a vocoder, therefore at reduced speed. The service signals of the received mail determine the choice of the type of operation of the codec 18 by the link block 144.

The user is informed of the arrival of such an attachment by displaying a corresponding indication on the screen 29, or by a buzzer not shown, and he then controls, by the keyboard 28, the reading of the data.

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 of the phonic attachment (143) and their sound reproduction on the loudspeaker 20.

In an operating variant, the phonic attachment is automatically transferred, as soon as it is received by the terminal 1, from the zone 143 to the answering machine-recorder 13, to be read there and restored later.

When the received attachment phonic signals (143) have been coded by a vocoder identical to the vocoder 21, the codec 18 is useless, and therefore controlled to be transparent. The attachment (143) is directly transferred to the answering machine-recorder 13 and is only decoded later in reading by the synthesizer 22.

However, provision may be made for the attachment (143) to be stored in the transponder-recorder 13 after decoding by the codec 18, appropriately controlled to operate in the desired mode. In such a case, the codec 18 can for example transform data, presented in packets of vocoded attachment, into conventional sound coding data with samples of fixed rhythm, 8 kHz or less. Full decoding, with analog storage, could be provided in another example. Depending on the form chosen for storage, the synthesizer 22 is, as mentioned above, possibly controlled to be transparent, for the last case above, or to process a decoding of samples at a fixed rate.

An attachment with sound content can, in the opposite direction, be generated from the signals from the microphone 19 and transmitted to the attachment memory area 143.

The vocoder 21 can then be used, by selecting the second channel of the routing circuits 17. The transponder-recorder 13 can operate in buffer to store all the phonic message, or be controlled to be transparent and immediately retransmit the vocoded phonic signals towards codec 18, then transparent too. If, on the contrary, a coding mode with fixed rate samples is desired, compatible with a conventional automatic exchange, the third channel of the routing circuits 17 is then chosen, by operating the codec 18 in coder mode.

The connection block 144, receiving the phonic signals coded by the coder 18, generates, in cooperation with the control and exchange block 140,

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 an electronic mail message and stores the phonic signals therein in the attachment field 143, the IP address of the recipient of the mail being entered by the keyboard 28.

Thus, in general, the memory area 143 and the transponder-recorder 13 each constitute a memory for storing phonic signals, encoded in an electronic mail format or in another format or even decoded, this memory having bidirectional access to the fields of attachment of the letters processed by the command and exchange block 140, to connect the purely telephone part (19,20) of the terminal to the world of the Internet.

As indicated at the beginning, the server 32 is provided for the storage of the mails intended for the terminal 1. In the event of reception of such a mail, the storage server 32 notifies the user of the terminal 1 by sending him a short SMS message of notification which is received by the SMS block 16 and forwarded to the microprocessor It to be displayed and / or activate an alarm indicating that mail is available. The SMS message can be provided to indicate, if this is the case, the presence of an attachment containing phonic data. The user then controls, by the keyboard 28 and the microprocessor 11, the command and exchange block 140 to call back the storage server 32 and order there the downloading of the stored mail or, at least, of the room field attached, in terminal 1. The download can here be carried out either by conventional telephone communication or by short SMS messages.

In the latter case, the command and exchange block 140 comprises software enabling the storage server 32 to be controlled in order to download by successive blocks of data, of size limited to that of a short SMS message.

When the command and exchange block 140 detects that an attachment to a mail received from the storage server 32 is of a format incompatible with the locally defined formats which the terminal 1 can process, it retransmits a copy of the mail, or commands the storage server 32 to carry out such a transmission, to the translation processing or format conversion server 33, the copy being associated with data representing a list of formats compatible with the terminal 1, which it can process. This translation function, external or remote, of the attachment format applies in particular here to attachments of phonic data. Server 33 is the equivalent of codec 18, but with possibilities for

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conversion supérieures, et permet de limiter la taille mémoire du terminal 1. Le serveur de conversion de format 33 transmet en retour au moins la pièce jointe, dans l'un des formats compatibles spécifiés.

higher conversion, and makes it possible to limit the memory size of the terminal 1. The format conversion server 33 transmits at least the attachment in return, in one of the compatible formats specified.

It is therefore possible in particular to exchange phonic signals between two terminals similar to terminal 1, transmitting electronic mails.

To this end, a sound sequence is recorded in the answering-recording machine 13 of one of the transmitting terminals, the sequence is coded as an attachment in an electronic mail, and, in the receiving terminal, the attachment is received and stored in the answering machine-recorder to perform the sound reproduction in delayed time. In particular, it is possible, on reception, to decode the attachment before storing it.

Claims (7)

CLAIMS 1-Radiotelephony terminal comprising means (140) for exchanging electronic mails, each mail comprising an attachment data field, terminal characterized in that it comprises means (13; 143,144) for storing signals phonic, arranged to connect transducer means (19, 20) of phonic communication, intended for a user, to the means for exchanging electronic mails (140) and arranged to access the attachment field. 2-terminal according to claim 1, wherein, the electronic mails being stored in a storage server (32), there are provided means (16) for receiving notifications from the server (32) of the availability of mails electronic attachment field containing phonic data and the exchange means (140) are arranged to call the server (32) and order the downloading of at least the attachment field in the terminal. 3-Terminal according to claim 2, wherein the exchange means (140) are arranged to control the download by successive blocks of data of limited size. 4-Terminal according to one of claims 1 to 3, in which the exchange means (140) are arranged to detect the presence of an attachment field (143), with phonic data, by reading a field signaling (141) mail. 5.-A method of transmitting phonic signals between two answering-recording terminals (13) of a radiotelephone network transmitting electronic mails, characterized in that - a sound sequence is recorded in the answering-recording (13) from one of the transmitting terminals - the sequence is coded as an attachment in an electronic mail which is transmitted to the other terminal and - in the receiving terminal, the attachment is received and stored (143) in the answering machine-recorder to carry out the delayed sound reproduction.  6. A method according to claim 5, wherein, on reception, the attachment is decoded before storing it. <Desc / Clms Page number 10> 7.- Method according to one of claims 5 and 6, wherein the receiving terminal, detecting an incompatibility of format of the attachment compared to formats it can process, it forwards the mail to a conversion server of format (33) to receive the attachment in a compatible format.