A method that may be used in variety of electronic devices for generating comfort noise includes receiving a plurality of information frames indicative of speech plus background noise, estimating one or more background noise characteristics based on the plurality of information frames, and generating a comfort noise signal based on the one or more background noise characteristics. The method may further include generating a speech signal from the plurality of information frames, and generating an output signal by switching between the comfort noise signal and the speech signal based on a voice activity detection.