Google’s latest audio codec enables voice to be clearly transmitted at incredibly low bitrates.
There’s a slim chance anyone has managed to avoid video or voice calling services that rely on internet connections by this stage, thanks in no small part to the global pandemic. There’s an even slimmer chance that these calls have been entirely free from dropouts, glitches, latency and other disruptive artefacts, but the latest advancement from Google’s AI division should help out on this front. As published in the Google AI Blog, a new audio codec dubbed Lyra has been developed by the team, aimed specifically at compressing speech into a lower bitrate. At merely 3kbps (that’s kilobits per second), Lyra uses significantly lower data than the most widely used codec at present – the open-source Opus, which „obtains transparent speech quality, indistinguishable from the original“ at 32kbps but can be operated at lower rates.
