Patent ID: 8374862

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a single utterance having a name portion, a disambiguation field identifier portion and a qualifier portion, the name portion representing a spoken name of a desired contact of a contacts database, the disambiguation field identifier portion for identifying a database field of the contacts database, distinct from a name field of the contacts database, to be used as a disambiguation field, the qualifier portion representing a spoken word or words for disambiguating the name of the desired contact from any homophone names in the contacts database; generating from the utterance a digital name representation corresponding to the name portion, a digital disambiguation field identifier representation corresponding to said disambiguation field identifier portion and a digital qualifier representation corresponding to the qualifier portion; and processing the digital name representation, digital disambiguation field identifier representation and the digital qualifier representation to uniquely identify, without prompting for any further disambiguation information, the desired contact within the contacts database, wherein said processing comprises: based on the digital name representation, identifying a set of candidate records from said contacts database, each of said candidate records having a name field value which represents the same name as said digital name representation or represents a homophone name of said digital name representation; based on said digital disambiguation field identifier representation, determining which database field common to said set of candidate records shall serve as said disambiguation field, the disambiguation field being distinct from the name field of the contacts database; and based on said digital qualifier representation, identifying a record representing the desired contact from said set of candidate records, said identifying said record comprising searching for a record in said set of candidate records whose disambiguation field value matches said digital qualifier representation.