Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book proposes to explain the technologies essential to the speech researcher and to clarify and hopefully widen his or her understanding of speech by focusing on the most recent of the digital processing technologies. It attempts to maintain a sense of descriptive unity and to sufficiently describe the mutual relationships between the techniques involved. The book explores the fundamental and principal elements of digital speech processing technology. It presents the more important techniques as well as applications of linear predictive coding analysis, speech waveform coding, speech synthesis, speech recognition, and speaker recognition. Speech can be said to be the single most important method through which people can readily convey information without the need for any 'carry-along' tool. Several important concepts, terms, and mathematical relationships are precisely explained in the appendixes.