Telephone apparatus with call forwarding arrangement

DETAILED DESCRIPTION The present invention has been developed in order to remove the above-described drawbacks inherent to the conventional automatic telephone answering apparatus.
The automatic telephone answering apparatus of this invention is capable of connection to a plurality of telephone lines.
The user registers in the automatic telephone answering apparatus a telephone number of a telephone equipment where the user will be staying (destination telephone number) and telephone numbers of desired calls.
The automatic telephone answering apparatus detects telephone number data of the caller sent from an exchange.
When the detected telephone number data agrees with the registered object telephone number, the automatic telephone answering apparatus automatically calls the destination telephone using the registered destination telephone number.
Therefore, an important call is transferred to the user staying at another place, so that the user can directly communicate with the important caller.
In addition, the frequency of response to the transferred calls is reduced because the transferred calls are limited to only calls from those telephones whose telephone numbers have been registered previously.
According to the present invention there is provided a first automatic telephone answering apparatus comprising: N communication interface circuits for communicating with N telephone lines, respectively, wherein N is a natural number and is more than one: a telephone number detection circuit for detecting telephone number data indicative of a caller's telephone through one of N telephone lines; a first memory area for storing a first telephone number; a second memory area for storing a second telephone number; a comparing circuit for comparing the detected telephone number data with the first telephone number; a control circuit for communicating with one other telephone line of N telephone lines when the telephone number data is agreed with the first telephone number; a dialing circuit for performing dialing using the second telephone number through one other telephone line; and a connection circuit for forming communication passage between one of N telephone lines and one other telephone line