Very low bit rate speech coding using a diphone-based recognition and synthesis approach

High compression rates of speech signals may be achieved by coding schemes based on relevant linguistic segments. A system is described that relies on a diphone recogniser as the coder and on a speech synthesiser reproducing speech starting from a diphone codebook as the decoder. The spoken message is encoded in textual (phoneme labels) plus prosody representation. This speech coding technique may be used for voice mail or phone communication over low bit rate channels