Digital communication system with integral messaging and method therefor

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENT While the specification concludes with claims defining the features of the invention that are regarded as novel, it is believed that the invention will be better understood from a consideration of the following description in conjunction with the drawing figures, in which like reference numerals are carried forward.
The instant invention takes advantage of the fact that, in many signals there are occurrences of periods of little or no information.
Such periods are referred to herein as silence periods.
One type of signal that is particularly suited to the invention is a speech or voice signal, as is found in telephony, for example.
It is well known that, in such signals, on average, a majority of the signal is silence, or periods of little information.
Some references indicate that as much as 63% of speech is of such low information content that it could be considered silence.
Speech sounds are typically grouped into one of three classes; plosive sounds, fricative sounds, and vocal sounds.
Unvoiced fricative sounds typically have little information content, and may be seen as silence or noise information in some circumstances.
The instant invention takes advantage of these periods of little information to conduct messaging between communicating equipment, and in some cases would consider unvoiced fricative speech as the occurrence of a silence period because of the low information content.
Referring now to FIG.
1, there is illustrated therein a block diagram of a digital communications system 10 in accordance with the invention.
In general there is a transmitting apparatus 12 and a receiving apparatus 14.
The transmitting apparatus 12 processes an information signal 16, such as a voice signal.
The information signal typically is originally in analog and is converted to digital form by an analog to digital converter 18.
When the information signal begins as analog, the analog to digital converter block comprises transducer circuitry, such as a microphone, for converting the original signal to an electrical analog signal, which is in turn converted to a digital form