Patent ID: 8249225

Claim:
A method of routing a telephone call that is placed to a call center, the method comprising: receiving, at a call center, a telephone call from a caller; a computer prompting the caller to speak, wherein the caller speaks in a caller's voice; the computer analyzing a prosody of the caller's voice; the computer identifying intonation, rhythm, stress, and inflection characteristics of the caller's voice from the analyzed prosody of the caller's voice; creating a profile of the caller from the identified characteristics; directing the call to a particular call recipient based on an analysis of the prosody of the caller's voice and the profile of the caller; placing incoming calls to the call center in an incoming call queue that schedules the order for answering normal calls to the call center based on a time of receipt of the call relative to other incoming calls placed in the incoming call queue; and in response to an analysis of the prosody of the caller's voice providing an indication that the call is of an urgent nature, immediately placing the call at the top of the incoming call queue to direct the call to a next available representative in the call center, whereby a call that is indicated as being of an urgent nature based on the urgency detected within the caller's voice is answered as a next call based on the location of the call at the top of the incoming call queue.