Patent US 4,100,377

A multiplex transmission system is disclosed in which speech activity is detected as a sequence of talkspurts and intervening silent intervals. The speech information is encoded and accumulated in a buffer store by omitting the silent intervals. A time stamp is associated with each talkspurt code burst to permit approximate reconstruction of the talkspurt time structure at the receiver. The talkspurt code bursts are assembled into packets of optimum size for transmission on shared transmission facilities, such as a Time Assignment Speech Interpolation (TASI) system. The assembled talkspurt packets can be encoded by an adaptive technique responsive to the loading on the transmission facilities and can be transmitted at a rate faster than real-time speech generation to accommodate high-level usage on the shared transmission facilities.