A variable bit rate speech coder is presented. The coder is based on the observation that a speech signal can be viewed as a combination of piecewise linear signals in a short time period. The encoder detects the sample points where the slope of the signal changes, which are called the inflection points in this paper. The coder transmits the location and value for the detected inflection sample, but only the location information for the noninflection samples. In the decoder, the noninflection samples are estimated with interpolation of the received information. Several factors affecting the performance of the coder have been tested through simulation. Simulation results show that the linear interpolation produces 1 ~ 5 dB improvement over the cubic spline interpolation. And the -law companding does not provide any benefit when it is applied before the inflection detection. With low threshold values in the inflection point detection, the coder shows better MOS and more than 16 dB improvement in SNR compared to the continuously variable slope delta modulation (CVSDM).