Method and apparatus for detecting unsolicited multimedia communications

Abstract

A service for searching for unsolicited communications is provided. For example, the service may inspect e-mail messages, instant messaging messages, facsimile transmissions, voice communications, and video telephony, and analyze these communications to determine whether an intended communication is unsolicited. In connection with voice and video telephony, a voice sample may be obtained from the caller and voice recognition may be performed on the sample to determine an identity of the person or the voice. The voice sample may also be used to determine the type of voice—i.e., if the voice is live, machine generated, or prerecorded. Where the call is a video telephony call, image recognition may be used to inspect an image of the person. The information obtained from voice recognition, voice type recognition, and image recognition may be used to detect whether the messages if from a known source of unsolicited communications.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A method of processing a media packet data stream, the method comprising:
 analyzing content of media data packets to detect presence or absence of at least one characteristic of the content of the media data packets, the at least one characteristic of the content being correlated with at least one characteristic of a source of the media data packets;   directing the media data packets based on the presence or absence of the at least one characteristic of the content.   
     
     
         2 . The method of  claim 1 , wherein the content of the media packets comprises at least one of audio content, speech content, video content and image content. 
     
     
         3 . An anti-SPX service, comprising:
 a computer processor; and   control logic configured to execute on the computer processor, said control logic containing:   first program instructions configured to enable the anti-SPX service to analyze e-mail messages and instant messaging messages to detect unsolicited e-mail and instant messaging messages; and   second program instructions configured to enable the anti-SPX service to analyze telephone calls to detect unsolicited telephone calls.   
     
     
         4 . The anti-SPX service of  claim 3 , wherein the second program instructions are configured to enable the anti-SPX service to obtain a voice sample associated with a source of the telephone call. 
     
     
         5 . The anti-SPX service of  claim 3 , wherein the second program instructions are configured to enable the anti-SPX service to perform voice recognition on the voice sample to determine if the voice sample is associated with a known source of unsolicited telephone calls. 
     
     
         6 . The anti-SPX service of  claim 3 , wherein the second program instructions are configured to enable the anti-SPX service to perform voice type recognition on the voice sample to determine the type of the voice in the voice sample. 
     
     
         7 . The anti-SPX service of  claim 3 , wherein the second program instructions are configured to enable the anti-SPX service to discern between live voices, pre-recorded voices, and machine generated voices. 
     
     
         8 . The anti-SPX service of  claim 3 , wherein the control logic further comprises third program instructions configured to enable the anti-SPX service to analyze video telephone calls to detect where a received video telephone call is an unsolicited video telephone call. 
     
     
         9 . The anti-SPX service of  claim 8 , wherein the third program instructions are configured to enable the anti-SPX service to obtain a video sample associated with the received video telephone call. 
     
     
         10 . The anti-SPX service of  claim 9 , wherein the third program instructions are configured to enable the anti-SPX service to perform image recognition on the video sample to determine if the image contained in the video sample is associated with a known source of unsolicited video telephone calls. 
     
     
         11 . The anti-SPX service of  claim 3 , wherein the control logic further comprises third program instructions configured to enable the anti-SPX service to analyze a facsimile communication to detect whether the facsimile is unsolicited. 
     
     
         12 . The anti-SPX service of  claim 11 , wherein the third program instructions are configured to enable the anti-SPX service to intercept the facsimile communication, build a bitmap from the facsimile communication, and perform character recognition on the bitmap to extract the content of the facsimile. 
     
     
         13 . The anti-SPX service of  claim 11 , wherein the third program instructions are further configured to perform handwriting analysis to extract the content of the facsimile.