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Digital Telephony
Telephony ( ) is the field of technology involving the development, application, and deployment of telecommunication services for the purpose of electronic transmission of voice, fax, or data, between distant parties. The history of telephony is intimately linked to the invention and development of the telephone. Telephony is commonly referred to as the construction or operation of telephones and telephonic systems and as a system of telecommunications in which telephonic equipment is employed in the transmission of speech or other sound between points, with or without the use of wires. The term is also used frequently to refer to computer hardware, software, and computer network systems, that perform functions traditionally performed by telephone equipment. In this context the technology is specifically referred to as Internet telephony, or voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Overview The first telephones were connected directly in pairs. Each user had a separate telephone wired ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speech
Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses Phonetics, phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if they are the same word, e.g., "role" or "hotel"), and using those words in their semantic character as words in the lexicon of a language according to the Syntax, syntactic constraints that Governance, govern lexical words' function in a sentence. In speaking, speakers perform many different intentional speech acts, e.g., informing, declaring, asking, persuading, directing, and can use Elocution, enunciation, Intonation (linguistics), intonation, degrees of loudness, tempo, and other non-representational or Paralanguage, paralinguistic aspects of vocalization to convey meaning. In their speech, speakers also unintentionally communicate many aspects of their social position such as sex, age, place of origin (through Accent (sociolinguistics ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Silence
Silence is the absence of ambient audible sound, the emission of sounds of such low intensity that they do not draw attention to themselves, or the state of having ceased to produce sounds; this latter sense can be extended to apply to the cessation or absence of any form of communication, whether through speech or other medium. Sometimes speakers fall silent when they hesitate in searching for a word, or interrupt themselves before correcting themselves. Discourse analysis shows that people use brief silences to mark the boundaries of prosodic units, in turn-taking, or as reactive tokens, e.g., as a sign of displeasure, disagreement, embarrassment, desire to think, confusion, and the like. Relatively prolonged intervals of silence can be used in rituals; in some religious disciplines, people maintain silence for protracted periods, or even for the rest of their lives, as an ascetic means of spiritual transformation. Rhetorical practice Silence may become an effective rheto ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Background Noise
Background noise or ambient noise is any sound other than the sound being monitored (primary sound). Background noise is a form of noise pollution or interference. Background noise is an important concept in setting noise levels. Background noises include environmental noises such as water waves, traffic noise, alarms, extraneous speech, bioacoustic noise from animals, and electrical noise from devices such as refrigerators, air conditioning, power supplies, and motors. The prevention or reduction of background noise is important in the field of active noise control. It is an important consideration with the use of ultrasound (e.g. for medical diagnosis or imaging), sonar, and sound reproduction. Other uses In astronomy, background noise or cosmic background radiation is electromagnetic radiation from the sky with no discernible source. In information architecture, irrelevant, duplicate or incorrect information may be called background noise. In physics and telecommunicat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Synchronization
Synchronization is the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. For example, the conductor of an orchestra keeps the orchestra synchronized or ''in time''. Systems that operate with all parts in synchrony are said to be synchronous or ''in sync''—and those that are not are '' asynchronous''. Today, time synchronization can occur between systems around the world through satellite navigation signals and other time and frequency transfer techniques. Navigation and railways Time-keeping and synchronization of clocks is a critical problem in long-distance ocean navigation. Before radio navigation and satellite-based navigation, navigators required accurate time in conjunction with astronomical observations to determine how far east or west their vessel traveled. The invention of an accurate marine chronometer revolutionized marine navigation. By the end of the 19th century, important ports provided time signals in the form of a signal gun, flag, or dropping time ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Buffer
In computer science, a data buffer (or just buffer) is a region of a memory used to temporarily store data while it is being moved from one place to another. Typically, the data is stored in a buffer as it is retrieved from an input device (such as a microphone) or just before it is sent to an output device (such as speakers). However, a buffer may be used when moving data between processes within a computer. This is comparable to buffers in telecommunication. Buffers can be implemented in a fixed memory location in hardware—or by using a virtual data buffer in software, pointing at a location in the physical memory. In all cases, the data stored in a data buffer are stored on a physical storage medium. A majority of buffers are implemented in software, which typically use the faster RAM to store temporary data, due to the much faster access time compared with hard disk drives. Buffers are typically used when there is a difference between the rate at which data is received and t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Time-assignment Speech Interpolation
In telecommunication, a time-assignment speech interpolation (TASI) was an analog technique used on certain long transmission links to increase voice-transmission capacity. TASI was invented by Bell Labs in the early 1960s to increase the capacity of transatlantic telephone cables. It was one of their first applications requiring electronic switching of voice circuits. Later digital circuit multiplication equipment included TASI as a feature, not as distinct hardware. Operation TASI takes advantage of the fact that in typical person-person conversation, speech in a single direction occurs for approximately 40% of the time, the remaining time being occupied with pauses and/or silence. Statistical analysis demonstrated that for an average voice channel usage of 40%, over 74 speech conversations could be handled using 37 full Duplex speech circuits thereby doubling potential revenue for a small capital outlay relative to a highly expensive cable. e.g. £12.5 million (£263 million ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice Over IP
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of speech, voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet telephony, broadband telephony, and broadband phone service specifically refer to the provisioning of communications services (voice, fax, Short Message Service, SMS, voice-messaging) over the Internet, rather than via the public switched telephone network (PSTN), also known as plain old telephone service (POTS). Overview The steps and principles involved in originating VoIP telephone calls are similar to traditional digital telephony and involve signaling, channel setup, digitization of the analog voice signals, and encoding. Instead of being transmitted over a circuit-switched network, the digital information is packetized and transmission occurs as IP packets over a packet-switched network. They transport media streams using spec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comfort Noise
Comfort noise (or comfort tone) is synthetic background noise used in radio and wireless communications to fill the artificial silence in a transmission resulting from voice activity detection or from the audio clarity of modern digital lines. Some modern telephone systems (such as wireless and VoIP) use voice activity detection (VAD), a form of squelching where low volume levels are ignored by the transmitting device. In digital audio transmissions, this saves bandwidth of the communications channel by transmitting nothing when the source volume is under a certain threshold, leaving only louder sounds (such as the speaker's voice) to be sent. However, improvements in background noise reduction technologies can occasionally result in the complete removal of all noise. Although maximizing call quality is of primary importance, exhaustive removal of noise may not properly simulate the typical behavior of terminals on the PSTN system. The result of receiving total silence, especia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice Activity Detection
Voice activity detection (VAD), also known as speech activity detection or speech detection, is the detection of the presence or absence of human speech, used in speech processing. The main uses of VAD are in speech coding and speech recognition. It can facilitate speech processing, and can also be used to deactivate some processes during non-speech section of an audio session: it can avoid unnecessary coding/transmission of silence packets in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications, saving on computation and on network bandwidth. VAD is an important enabling technology for a variety of speech-based applications. Therefore, various VAD algorithms have been developed that provide varying features and compromises between latency, sensitivity, accuracy and computational cost. Some VAD algorithms also provide further analysis, for example whether the speech is voiced, unvoiced or sustained. Voice activity detection is usually independent of language. It was first investigat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Silence Suppression
The term silence suppression is used in telephony to describe the process of not transmitting information over the network when one of the parties involved in a telephone call is not speaking, thereby reducing bandwidth usage. Voice is carried over a digital telephone network by converting the analog signal to a digital signal which is then packetized and sent electronically over the network. The analogue signal is re-created at the receiving end of the network. When one of the parties does not speak, background noise is picked up and sent over the network. This is inefficient as this signal carries no useful information and thus, bandwidth is wasted. Given that typically only one party in a conversation speaks at any one time, silence suppression can achieve overall bandwidth savings in the order of 50% over the duration of a telephone call. (While both parties may sometimes speak at the same time, there are times when both parties are silent.) Silence suppression is achieved by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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