Patent ID: 7231019

Claim:
A method of identifying a caller of a call from the caller to a recipient, the method comprising: (a) receiving a voice input from the caller; (b) applying characteristics of the voice input to a plurality of acoustic models, which comprises a generic acoustic model and acoustic models of previously identified callers, to obtain a plurality of respective acoustic scores, wherein the generic acoustic model comprises caller independent models of a plurality of speech units; (c) identifying the caller as one of the previously identified callers or a new caller based on the plurality of acoustic scores; (d) if the caller is identified as a new caller in step (c), generating a new acoustic model for the new caller from the caller-independent models of the generic acoustic model and modifying the caller-independent models of the speech units that are included in the voice input to represent the characteristics of the voice input received from the new caller such that the new acoustic model for the new caller and the acoustic models of any previously identified callers comprise the same plurality of speech units; and (e) generating a user prompt, which identifies certain ones of the acoustic models of previously identified callers for merging together.