Speech Acts-Enhanced SIP Communication

In workplaces, phone calls constitute a very common way of communication. However, the callee typically has no means to know what the caller wants to talk about. This can be counterproductive if the callee is busy performing a task that is more important and/ or urgent than the conversation that is about to be initiated by the caller. The present article addresses this issue and comes up with a new enhanced communication service. First, a communication model based on speech acts is proposed. Speech acts are used by the caller to indicate the call intention or subject to the callee in the most clear and unambiguous possible way. Then, an Internet telephony implementation of the speech acts-based model is designed to fit the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The solution is validated through a case study.