Patent ID: 7092875

Claim:
A speech transcoding method for transcoding a first speech code, which is obtained by encoding an input signal by a first speech encoding scheme, to a second speech code of a second speech encoding scheme, comprising the steps of: demultiplexing a first silence code, which has been obtained by encoding a silence signal contained in the input signal by a silence compression function of the first speech encoding scheme, into a plurality of first element codes; transcoding the plurality of first element codes to a plurality of second element codes that constitute a second silence code; and multiplexing the plurality of second element codes, which have been obtained by the transcoding, to thereby output the second silence code, wherein the first element codes are codes obtained by splitting the silence signal into frames comprising a fixed number of samples, and quantizing characteristic parameters, which represent characteristics of the silence signal obtained by analysis frame by frame, using quantization tables specific to the first speech encoding scheme; and the second element codes are codes obtained by quantizing said characteristic parameters using quantization tables specific to the second speech encoding scheme.