I. Introduction
Contemporary speech coders such as CELP, MELP, MBE, or WI provide good quality speech at bit rates as low as 2400 b/s. However, for very low bit rates on the order of 100 b/s, these coders are unable to produce high quality speech, due to the reduced number of bits available for accurate modeling of the signal. In an effort to overcome this limitation, a new speech coder is proposed. This coder employs a different paradigm than conventional speech coders and is meant for applications where there are no delay or complexity limitations. For example, such a coder is very useful when requiring storage of large amount of pre-recorded speech. A talking book [4], which is a spoken equivalent of its printed version, requires huge space for storing speech waveforms unless a high compression coding scheme is applied. Similarly, for a wide variety of multimedia applications, such as language learning assistance, electronic dictionaries and encyclopedias there are potential applications of very low bit rate speech coders.