A user talking on a portable telephone often has relatively limited ability to watch indications on the display of the phone. For example, when the user is talking in the car, the user cannot pay attention to many additional variables. Such cellular phones typically have a display. However, when the phone is held up to the user""s ear, the display cannot be watched.
Analog cellular phones inadvertently alert the user to low level of received radio signals. This is alerted by an increase in audio noise. However, digital phones maintain low noise audio until the moment when a call is dropped. Many users find this to be disconcerting. Phone users are often more comfortable with an audio indication of bad reception such as exists on an analog phone. This gives them a chance to plan mentally for the interruption of the call.
A digital phone user finds the received audio strength by looking at the signal strength indicator. This is usually a bar graph on the phone. This requires interrupting the conversation and moving the phone away from normal speaking position to view the display.
Other indications are similarly displayed on the display of the telephone.
The present inventors recognize that the display of the telephone is often a bad place to put such information. This is because the user must interrupt the telephone conversation in order to see the display.
The present inventors also recognize that a digital phone, in which certain of these effects are more prevalent, already has certain hardware that could be used to at least partially deal with this issue. For example, digital telephones and especially CDMA telephones, already use voice coding techniques. The vocoder inherently has the ability to synthesize certain sounds and voices. The microprocessor is able to control such synthesis.
A first aspect of the present system is to use the received signal strength indicator to produce an audio signal generated by the vocoder in the telephone. This audio signal is mixed with the incoming voice, and presented to the user.
Another more general aspect is the control of this audio signal, by using the existing digital sound control device, which already controls reconstruction of digital voice communications, to create audio indications that are produced for the user to hear.
Yet another aspect includes different indicia being presented to the user through the audio telephone.
A specific aspect includes a cellular telephone system for in-band audio signaling, that has a controlling structure, including a user interface and a processor which processes commands from the user interface. A digital voice coding system, receiving information indicative of a cellular communication in digital voice form and converting said digital voice form to audio voice; and a status detection system, detecting a predetermined status to be indicated to a user, and commanding said digital voice coding module to provide an audio indication to the user indicative of said detected status.