Patent ID: 8161118

Claim:
A method of soliciting and facilitating a response to an electronic communication, the method comprising: receiving at a server from an originator device a request for the electronic communication with one or more recipients, the request for the electronic communication comprising an email from the originator device to each of the one or more recipients; determining by the server based on the request whether to solicit a response from the one or more recipients, wherein determining whether to solicit a response from the one or more recipient devices is based on one or more keywords in the request for the electronic communication; determining by the server a presence of each of the one or more recipients; in response to determining to solicit a response from the one or more recipients, determining by the server one or more possible responses to the electronic communication based on one or more selections from the originator device wherein the selections from the originator device comprise a plurality of predetermined possible responses indicated by the originator device to the server, generating by the server a plurality of messages based on the email from the originator device, each of the plurality of messages including the one or more possible responses and the plurality of messages comprising a plurality of different message types including two or more of an email message, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) message, an Instant Message (IM), a Short Message Service (SMS) message, and a Multimedia Message Service (MMS) message, and sending the plurality of messages from the server to the one or more recipients to initiate the communication; and in response to determining to not solicit a response from the one or more recipients, generating by the server a plurality of messages based on the email from the originator device, the plurality of messages comprising a plurality of different message types including two or more of an email message, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) message, an Instant Message (IM), a Short Message Service (SMS) message, and a Multimedia Message Service (MMS) message and sending the plurality of messages to the one or more recipients from the server.