| 摘要 |
Telephone handsets alert their owner/operators to the presence of an incoming telephone call by producing a distinctive sound commonly referred to as the ring. The tonality of this ring is typically engineered by the handset's manufacturer, on a model by model basis, to be a single, specific sound. The ring's duration, however, is fixed by industry practice to approximately two seconds in length. In this invention, the ring is recordable and programmable, both in its tonality and its duration, by the owner/operator, and many such rings can be recorded and maintained at any given time by the invention in its memory bank, for eventual play back, when an incoming telephone call is detected. Furthermore, any ring in the invention's memory bank may be expressly assigned to only play back when the incoming telephone call is determined to have originated from a specific caller's telephone number. Additionally, any ring in the invention's memory bank may also be transmitted by the invention to the calling party once the owner/operator has responded to the incoming telephone call by placing the handset in an offhook condition.
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