ABSTRACT
Digital speech coding is used in a wide variety of everyday applications that the ordinary person takes for granted, such as network telephony or telephone answering machines. By speech coding we mean a method for reducing the amount of information needed to represent a speech signal for transmission or storage applications. For most applications this means using a lossy compression algorithm because a small amount of perceptible degradation is acceptable. This section reviews some of the applications, the basic attributes of speech coders, methods currently used for coding, and some of the most important speech coding standards.
