ECHOSPEECH™

Voice of the Web™

ECHOSPEECH is a very high quality speech coder that compresses speech 18.5 to 1. This means that 16 bit speech sampled at 11025 Hz is compressed to 9600 bits per second. Even people with 14400 modems can listen in real time to ECHOSPEECH, and because ECHOSPEECH was designed to code speech sampled at 11025 Hz rather than 8000 Hz, it sounds better. ECHOSPEECH is also extremely fast. Real time decoding of 11kHz speech requires only 30% of a 486SX-33 CPU. You don't need a special server to play echospeech files on your webpage, just use the embed tag.


Tips On Listening

It is important to adjust the volume on your speakers so that you get the best sound. In addition, on some occasions the sound you hear will be broken up. This happens because the sound file is being streamed into your system. To get the best sound, allow the file to completely download. Next look for the echospeech icon on the screen, move your mouse there and then click. You will hear the speech complete in its entirety without any buffering interruptions.


Installation for the PC

To install this plugin, first click on one of the links below to initiate the download of the appropriate version. If you are using the 32 bit version of Navigator or Internet Explorer 3.0 or later, then you should download the 32 bit version of the plugin. If you are using the 16 bit version of Navigator, then you should use the 16 bit version of the plugin (even if you are running the 16 bit version of Navigator under Windows 95).

32-bit Plugin Installation

Once your have selected the 32-bit version of the plugin for download, your browser will ask you where to save it. If you are using the 32-bit version of the plugin, it is not important where you save it. Just be sure to remember the path to the file you download (npe32_15.exe) so that you can find it and run it later.

When you run the self-extracting executable, it will search the hard drives which are available on your computer for installed browsers. It will then ask which of the browsers you would like to make the plug-in avialable to. The plugin file (npecho32.dll) will then be copied to the appropriate locations. After installation is complete, be sure to re-start your browser to initialize the plug-in.

16-bit Plugin Installation

Once your have selected the 16-bit version of the plugin for download, your browser will ask you where to save it. Browse within the Save As.. dialog box until you locate a subdirectory called PLUGINS. Open this directory and save the ECHOSPEECH self extracting executable file. If you do not see the PLUGINS directory, browse around within the browser's directory until you find it. If you are using an appropriate web browser program, the directory will already exist, do NOT create a new directory. Once you have downloaded the executable to your plugins directory, run it. It will ask you where to save the files it unzips. Use the default location. This will place the npecho16.dll file into your plugins directory.

After the npecho32.dll or npecho16.dll file has been copied into the plugins directory, the last thing you need to do is exit and then rerun your browser program. This is necessary to make the browser find the new ECHOSPEECH plugin. Note that you do NOT need to restart Windows. You also do NOT need to restart your Internet connection. You also do NOT need to configure your browser to do anything more to recognize the .ES file type.


Download the 32-bit ECHOSPEECH plugin. (Version 1.5) (41 kbytes)

Download the 16-bit ECHOSPEECH plugin. (Version 1.5) (33 kbytes)


Macintosh Plugins

Save the appropriate download into your plugins directory, then run the self-extracting executable which will decompress the plugin. Then be sure to re-start Navigator

Version 2.2 of EchoCast with DolbyNET support is now available for the Mac.

Download the EchoCast 2.2 Plugin for 680x0 based Macs (64 kbytes)
Download the EchoCast 2.2 Plugin for Power PC based Macs (76 kbytes)
Download the EchoCast 2.2 Fat Binary Plugin (native on 68K and PPC) (122 kbytes)