:I tried this code yesterday.  On my Sparcstation ELC it takes over
:300 seconds to compress 22 seconds' worth of speech.  This means that it
:needs to be "optimized" by over a factor of 10 before it will be usable
:in even a half-duplex mode.

Ouch!  Thanks for trying it.

:I question whether CELP is the best approach for this application.  It produces
:great compression but at the expense of tremendous CPU loads.  We want
:something that can be run on ordinary workstations or even high-end PC's
:without DSP cards.  My guess is that some other algorithm is going to be
:a better starting point.

Yes.  I'm not sure if my xposting to comp.speech made it to here too, but
I've found that a low sample rate (3300 samples/sec at 8 bits per sample)
plus the pd 'shorten' lossless sound compression code actually does get
speech into 14.4K with a simdgen left over.  This is *definitely* worth
working on, folks.  And shorten works in well under real-time.