Telephone method and apparatus

Abstract

A telephone and telephone answering apparatus and method are described for using secondary information embedded in audio passages included in phone calls. The telephone and telephone answering device monitors received calls to automatically detect for the presence of embedded secondary information. Some embodiments merely receive, automatically monitor for the presence of, and use secondary information. Other embodiments are also capable of generating and of embedding secondary information into audio passages.

1 . A cellular communications apparatus comprising:
 means for communicating over a cellular communications network;   means for receiving information over the cellular communications network in Rich Call Format;   means for extracting steganographically encoded secondary information from information received over the cellular communications network in Rich Call Format, and   means for using said extracted steganographically encoded secondary information from said information received over the cellular communications network in Rich Call Format.