| Abstrakt: |
As switched digital connectivity becomes pervasive [in forms such as the integrated services digital network (ISDN)], the opportunity increases for expanding the sophistication and utility of teleconferencing systems. A strong interest is to integrate information modalities for voice, image, data, fax, video, and broadband audio. As these teleconferencing system features expand, ease and simplicity of use become increasingly important. Hands-free voice control and natural conversational interaction become desirable for communication between the human user and the conference system. Recent advances in autodirective microphone arrays, speech recognition and synthesis, and low bit-rate coding of speech and image provide new technologies to serve sophisticated conferencing systems. This report describes an experimental system, called HuMaNet (for Human/Machine Network), which integrates multimedia capabilities into a conferencing system designed for public-switched basic-rate ISDN. This digital transport has a capacity of '2B + D,' or two circuit-switched channels of 64k bits/s each (B), and one packet-switched channel of 16k bits/s (D). The system design and conferencing features are described, including those for ISDN call setup, voice control, and access of local and remote databases for image and text, and high-quality stereo sound transmission. Operation of the system is demonstrated from a video recording. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
