US Patent 7882243 Connecting external devices to a gaming voice chat service

Voice chat enhances the game playing experience by allowing gamers in different locations to have conversations within the gaming environment. Functionality can be implemented within a gaming system to send an external invitation a user who is logged out of the game system to participate in a voice chat and/or multiplayer game session. The user can choose to accept the invitation and participate in the voice chat session on a device such as a mobile phone. Automatically generating external requests improves convenience for players, especially when inviting several other players to a voice chat session, because they do not have to find external contact information for each player who is not logged in.