Patent ID: 8244540

Claim:
A method of providing a first communication device with a textual representation of a voice message input at a second communication device, the method comprising: automatically detecting that the first communication device is operating in a silent mode in which the first communication device is switched on but wherein calls are directly routed to a user's messaging system; in response to said detection, prompting input of a voice message at the second communication device; automatically converting the voice message input at the second communication device to phonemes by: (i) accessing a dictionary of words and their corresponding phonemes to identify, where present, a word which corresponds to a group of the phonemes; (ii) for a phoneme not recognized as part of a word in the dictionary, representing the phoneme as a representative character; and automatically transmitting a textual representation of the converted voice message to the first communication device, the textual representation including characters representative of at least some of the phonemes.