Patent ID: 8090367

Claim:
An information providing system for a vehicle, the system including (i) an in-vehicle information output apparatus mounted to the vehicle and (ii) a cellular phone capable of communicating with the in-vehicle information output apparatus, the information providing system comprising: an input information acquisition section provided in the cellular phone for acquiring input information based on at least one of (i) a speech of a user's telephone call using the cellular phone located inside or outside of the vehicle and (ii) address information of a user's browser to an external network using the cellular phone located inside or outside of the vehicle, the input information acquisition section including a microphone, which functions as a telephone transmitter of the cellular phone, the microphone acquiring the speech of the telephone call by the user; a population accumulation section provided in the cellular phone for accumulating, as a parent population data, input information acquired by the input information acquisition section within a predetermined period up to a present time; an interest information extraction section provided in the cellular phone or the in-vehicle information output apparatus for extracting interest information reflecting a present interest of the user from the parent population data for interest extraction accumulated by the population accumulation section; a provision information collection section provided in the in-vehicle information output apparatus for collecting provision information, which matches the extracted interest information; an information output section provided in the in-vehicle information output apparatus for outputting the provision information collected by the provision information collection section in an image, a sound, or a combination of an image and a sound; a speech recognition section provided in the cellular phone or the in-vehicle information output apparatus for performing speech recognition of the speech acquired by the microphone of the cellular phone to speech-recognize input information; and a keyword extraction section provided in the cellular phone or the in-vehicle information output apparatus for extracting a keyword for determining user's interest from the speech-recognized input information; the population accumulation section including a keyword accumulation portion to accumulate the extracted keyword; the provision information collection section being configured to retrieve provision information to be collected based on the keyword extracted by the keyword extraction section, the interest information extraction section being configured to analyze an appearance frequency of the keyword accumulated in the keyword accumulation portion, and give a higher priority to a keyword having a greater appearance frequency, the priority being used when the provision information collection section collects the provision information.