Patent ID: 8594318

Claim:
A method for communicating a caller's intent to a plurality of users sharing a phone number, the method comprising: (a) providing an intent-indicating apparatus comprising a microprocessor, a memory, a display screen and an input mechanism enabling users of a telephone to store personalized information in the memory and/or to select personalized information from the memory; (b) storing by a plurality of users or by any other party at least one of an alert preference or a personal display image preference as the personalized information, wherein each user is assigned an ID code associated with the personalized information; (c) answering an incoming call with an announcement requesting a caller to identify one of the users by ID code; and (d) in response to an ID code selected by the caller, triggering at least one of the playing of the alert preference stored as personalized information by the user associated with the ID code or the displaying on the display screen of the display image stored as personalized information by the user associated with the ID code; (e) storing by the intent-indicating apparatus the identification information of the user identified by the caller and the identification information of the caller for subsequent browsing by the user, such that when browsing the incoming call information stored for each incoming call, the user is capable of avoiding browsing stored information describing other incoming calls indicated by the respective callers as being intended for the other users; wherein the identification information of the user includes at least one of the user ID or other text or code identifier; wherein the identification information of the caller includes at least one of the phone number of the caller, the caller ID of the caller, the name of the caller, or any other text or code identifier; wherein the incoming call information includes at least one of the identification information of the user, identification information of the caller, date of the incoming call, time of the incoming call, message-to-callee, or code indicating a context or level of urgency of the incoming call selected by the caller.