Abstract: A unified messaging system enables access to a variety of messaging devices and storage of messages in a single uniform e-mail attachment format. Furthermore, the system also provides e-mail messages to users without requiring said users to locally store said messages on a storage volume.

Abstract: A process for determining the presence of either speech or one of a plurality of expected single-frequency signals on a line includes the steps of measuring the total signal energy on the line; measuring the signal energy present in each one of a plurality of selected separate frequency bands and identifying the two frequency bands having the highest signal energies; determining whether the highest signal energy exceeds a first selected threshold value; determining whether the highest signal energy exceeds the second highest signal energy by greater than a second selected threshold value; determining the amount of out-of-band signal energy; and determining whether the highest signal energy exceeds the out-of-band signal energy by greater than a third selected threshold value.

Abstract: A method for real-time recognition of speech and call-progression tone energy includes the steps of digitizing an analog signal present on a signal line, correlating N neighboring portions of the digitized signal, performing FFT analysis on the digitized signal, identifying the three largest frequency-domain maxima, determining whether the two largest maxima are above a threshold frequency, and determining whether the ratio of the largest to the third largest maxima exceeds a predetermined value. According to the present invention, the steps of the method may be performed in real time using fixed-point hardware by approximating the correlation and FFT functions.

Abstract: A compression and expansion apparatus and method for compressing and expanding digital audio signals using adaptive differential pulse-coding-modulation for high fidelity music is described. The apparatus comprises a predictor, a first and second adder, a first and second adjuster, a quantizer, an inverse quantizer and a step-size adaptor. An input digital signal and predicted signal are added by the first adder, producing the difference between the two signals. The output of the first adder is coupled to the first adjuster which acts as a multiplier to alter the gain and normalize the signal. The signal is then quantized by the quantizer. The output of the quantizer is sent to both the inverse quantizer and the adaptor. The adaptor acts like an automatic-gain-control to control the gain provided by the first adjuster. After inverse quantization by the inverse quantizer, the signal is sent to the second adjuster to remove the effects of the first adjuster process, i.e. denormalize and remove gain.