METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR TRANSMITTING SPEECH ACTIVITY IN DISTRIBUTED VOICE RECOGNITION SYSTEMS

A system and method for transmitting speech activity in a distributed voice recognition system. The distributed voice recognition system includes a local VR engine in a subscriber unit and a server VR engine on a server. The local VR engine comprises an advanced feature extraction (AFE) module that extracts features from a speech signal, and a voice activity detection (VAD) module that detects voice activity within a speech signal. The combined results from the VAD module and feature extraction module are provided in an efficient manner to a remote device, such as a server, in the form of advanced front end features, thereby enabling the server to process speech segments free of silence regions. Various aspects of efficient speech segment transmission are disclosed.