NETWORK CONFERENCE SYSTEM USING LIMITED BANDWIDTH TO GENERATE LOCALLY ANIMATED DISPLAYS

Electronic conferencing is provide over a computer network, such as the Internet, by passing streams of text with embedded explicit audio and graphics commands. Text is translated to audible speech at the end-user computers by a text-to-speech processor to reduce the amount of data transferred between computers. Implicit commands are generated from the text at the end-user computers as the audible speech is generated. Implicit command may control, for example, the animation of lips to provide a realistic image of the words of the text being spoken. Explicit commands can be used to control the voice characteristics by the text-to-speech processor or to control animation.