Abstract: A system and method for delivering purchasing incentives and a variety of other retail shopping aids through a computer network, such as by E-mail over the Internet or the World Wide Web. Customers (10) of retail stores can establish a bidirectional communication link with the system, log in (16) to the system, and then elect to browse among available purchasing incentive offers (18, 22), or elect to explore other shopping aids, such as a shopping list generator (26), a recipe center (30), or simply elect to claim a product rebate or to receive product information. If the customer elects to have product information or rebate information delivered, only minimal customer identification is required. For purchase incentives redeemable at retail stores, the customer must provide identification information and must also designate a retailer (12) at which the purchasing incentive can be exercised.

Abstract: An improved vocoder system and method for estimating pitch in a speech waveform which more accurately disregards false pitch estimates resulting from secondary excitations. The vocoder system first performs a correlation calculation on a speech frame and generates an estimated pitch value. The present invention then compares the estimated or determined pitch with a threshold value to determine if the determined or estimated pitch has a suspiciously low pitch value. If so, the present invention performs error checking to disregard pitch estimates that are the result of the First Formant frequency's contribution to the pitch estimation process. The error checking involves examining the higher multiples of the determined pitch value to ascertain whether the determined pitch value might be incorrect. The present invention determines whether one or more higher multiples are missing, whether the higher multiples are related by a common factor, and whether adjacent multiples have missing peaks.