is assumed to be error free and the speech coder proceeds to synthesize speech 314 for that frame if errors have been detected in the information block 316 the redundant block is checked for errors 318 using the corresponding crc if no errors are detected 320 in the redundancy block the information block is discarded the redundancy is deinterleaved step not shown and the inverse is taken 322 to yield the transmitted information block if however errors are detected in the redundancy 324 the redundancy is de interleaved and combined with the information block for threshold decoding 326 after either of these correction processes 322 or 326 the crc over the 34 corrected 34 data is recomputed 328 as a check to ensure that there has been no decoding failure this last computation is made possible by the provision of forward error correction fec coding over the crc of the information block with the addition of the final fec check the system has become highly robust to false decoding if the correction has been successful 330 the speech synthesis proceeds 314 if correction has not been successful 332 the error containing frame is deleted and a previous correct frame is substituted since the last previous frame may not have been correct either a counter of consecutive deleted frames is updated 324 when inserted in place of the incorrect one subsequent deleted frames result in muted audio which is highly preferable to synthesizing potentially noisy speech frames thus there has been shown and described a method for error correction in a communicative system for digitally encoded speech the improvement derives from a unique.