APPARATUS SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SPEECH COMPRESSION AND DECOMPRESSION

The invention provides system, apparatus, and method for compressing a speech signal by decimating or removing somewhat redundant portions of the signal while retaining reference signal portions sufficient to reconstruct the signal without noticeable loss in quality, thereby permitting a storage and transmission of high quality speech with minimal storage volume or transmission bandwidth requirements. Speech pitch waveform decimation is used to reduce data to produce an encoded speech signal during compression, and time based interpolative speech reconstruction is used on the encoded signal to reconstruct the original speech signal. In one aspect, the invention provides a method for processing a speech signal that includes identifying portions of the speech signal representing individual speech pitches; generating an encoded speech signal from the speech pitches, the encoded speech signal retaining ones of the plurality of pitches and omitting other ones of the plurality of pitches; and generating a reconstructed speech signal by replacing each the omitted pitch with an interpolated replacement pitch having signal waveform characteristics which are interpolated from a first retained reference pitch occurring temporally earlier to the pitch to be interpolated and from a second retained reference pitch occurring temporally later than the pitch to be interpolated. In another aspect apparatus is provided to perform the speech compression and reconstruction method. In another aspect an internet voice electronic mail system is provided which has minimal voice message storage and transmission requirements while retaining high fidelity voice quality.