Patent ID: 6895083

Claim:
An automated call routing system that routes a telephone call by responding to a routing objective of a calling party, comprising: a speech recognizer that determines at least one phrase from a speech utterance made by the calling party and outputs a digital phrase; a topic identifier that receives the digital phrase and converts the digital phrase to at least one of a word stem and a word class and generates a topic output; and a maximum benefit router that receives the topic output and determines where to route the telephone call in order to optimize at least one predetermined parameter, said telephone call route based on maximum benefit; wherein the topic output is a feature vector that contains the number of times the at least one word stems and word classes were found in the determined phrase, and wherein the maximum benefit router performs at least one of analyzing the feature vector, outputting a posterior possibilities vector, inputting a posterior possibilities vector and determining the expected benefit of routing the call to each of a predetermined destination, and outputting a benefit sorted vector of destinations, benefits and topic scores.