A study of future directions for low rate speech processor research, development, and implementation

The objective of the study was to relate device technology developments to voice terminal concepts and designs, in order to better understand the steps that would eventually lead to very small and inexpensive narrowband terminal implementations. The overall conclusion derived from this effort can be summarized as follows: Given the present and near future advances in technology it is predictable that present-day vocoder algorithms will soon be implementable as low cost compact devices. How soon this comes to pass does not depend on any new technological breakthroughs but rather on the direction of investments in LSI development realizable with present device technology. Future systems will require terminal capabilities that exceed those of current designs, and these will result in commensurately more complex hardware implementations.