1. The method of utilizing a telephone instrument having transmitter and receiver components, and further including a touch pad having individually depressable alpha-numeric keys each representing a single number and a plurality of letters of the alphabet, to obtain a desired piece of information in the form of a directory listing as a response to an inquiry for said directory listing generated at the sites of the instrument, that comprises the steps of: (a) spelling out one or more words of the desired listing by a single depression, for each letter in a word, of only that key, and no others, that represents said letter; (b) transmitting the alphabetically ordered inquiry, encoded as a numeric string containing individual numbers representing the respective individual letters, from the transmitter component of the instrument to a computer means, numeral by numeral; (c) searching at the computer means, after each key depression, through a data base for a single complete piece of previously stored information in the form of a telephone directory listing, that will alone match the string of numbers entered up to that point to and including the last key depression of a key and notwithstanding the fact that said string may not yet be complete; and (d) immediately upon finding a match between a single complete piece of previously stored directory listing information and a string of numbers that may as yet be incomplete, providing the caller, by means of synthesized voice response, with said piece of information without awaiting alphabetic keying of the complete inquiry by the caller, said data base being subdivided into fillettes each of which contains a select group of listings in numeric string form.
1. The method of utilizing a telephone instrument having transmitter and receiver components, and further including a touch pad having individually depressable alpha-numeric keys each representing a single number and a plurality of letters of the alphabet, to obtain a desired piece of information in the form of a directory listing as a response to an inquiry for said directory listing generated at the sites of the instrument, that comprises the steps of: (a) spelling out one or more words of the desired listing by a single depression, for each letter in a word, of only that key, and no others, that represents said letter; (b) transmitting the alphabetically ordered inquiry, encoded as a numeric string containing individual numbers representing the respective individual letters, from the transmitter component of the instrument to a computer means, numeral by numeral; (c) searching at the computer means, after each key depression, through a data base for a single complete piece of previously stored information in the form of a telephone directory listing, that will alone match the string of numbers entered up to that point to and including the last key depression of a key and notwithstanding the fact that said string may not yet be complete; and (d) immediately upon finding a match between a single complete piece of previously stored directory listing information and a string of numbers that may as yet be incomplete, providing the caller, by means of synthesized voice response, with said piece of information without awaiting alphabetic keying of the complete inquiry by the caller, said data base being subdivided into fillettes each of which contains a select group of listings in numeric string form. 3. The method of claim 1 wherein each filette ends with a numeric string dissimilar from a numeric string existing in any other filette.