Patent ID: 7349527

Claim:
A method for extracting demographic information, comprising: initiating a dialog between a contact and a call handling system; selecting a set of demographic characteristics; assigning a set of acoustic confidence scores to the demographic characteristics; assigning a set of substantive confidence scores to the demographic characteristics, wherein assigning substantive confidence scores includes: presenting the contact with a set of multiple choice questions associated with the demographic characteristics; collecting a set of responses to the multiple choice questions from the contact, wherein the set of responses includes a choice that the contact selected from the multiple choices; comparing the contact's responses to a predefined body of multiple choice question responses associated with the set of demographic characteristics; and assigning a set of multiple choice confidence scores to the demographic characteristics based on the comparison; combining the acoustic, multiple choice, and substantive confidence scores for each of the demographic characteristics using at least one of a weighted linear summation and a weighted exponential; and tailoring information presented to the contact using the set of combined confidence scores.