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Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

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Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#231

Post by jonotime »

rz2k wrote: post #199
jonotime wrote: post #179

My problem with Telegram is I want to use it but they wont let me. I use a budget phone service (freedompop) which apparently is technically voip, but I did not know until I tried to register for Telegram with it. They refuse to send me text verification. Wont work with my google voice number either. WhatsApp does not have this problem. And what if I want to use Telegram on desktop only? Why do I need to verify a pho…

It worked with my Google Voice number just now. Could they have changed the policy? I did sign up with my iPad (with cell service) first then iPhone, so it was probably more open to not using the device's phone number.

Hey! What do you know? I guess they added support after enough complaints. Now I'll give it a go.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#232

Post by dgellow »

dgellow wrote: post #64
unicornporn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come https://riot.im (Matrix) manages to sync between devices AND have E2E, while also being federated? That's not what you get when you have a secure system, that's what you get when you design a system that can collect (and possibly monetize) the data of millions of users.

That's not what I meant. Yes you can have sync and E2E. With different trade-offs. Telegram is secure from device to device, not from account to account. If I send you a secure message from my iPad I don't have to worry about the web session I opened a week ago on someone else laptop.

People down voting this comment, care to explain what's wrong with it?

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#233

Post by doctorshady »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #214
Animats wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best phone voice quality is still ISDN. Digital all the way to the handset, and rigidly clocked with fixed delay. Switzerland has ISDN phones, and the voice quality is impressive.

ISDN was 64kbps pet channel though - and to my knowledge did not use a wideband voice codec by default (or at least didn't mandate all ISDN receivers support wideband audio). Lots of people who had ISDN kit plugged their old POTS phones into their TAs anyway.

ISDN is actually used quite a bit in niche markets in the states. For studios, typically you'll see a couple B-channels bonded to give someone 128K MP3 or AAC. At a bare minimum, 64 kbps/16khz g.722 is used. I worked in a newsroom a few years ago where I frequently had to record a weather guy from a distant area who used this.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#234

Post by doctorshady »

torrent-of-ions wrote: post #121

I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will work but not always. But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, a…

Unless you're hitting an IP node that transcodes to g.729 or something, landline phones should sound pretty good; the mu-law codec uses companded 8-bit PCM that roughly equates to about 14-bit linear in terms of precision. If you're sending a lot of very low frequencies (most phones and line cards have a pass filter in them to remove stuff below ~60-100 hertz, so while the network is very capable of sending it, it doesn't always in practice), you'll start to hear companding noise, but it's rarely the case that it gets loud enough to cause an issue.

As for the sample rate, 8 khz is a bit low, but you can make it sound significantly better with a bit of equalization; usually turning down frequencies near 1 khz a little goes a long way. Sometimes too, it doesn't hurt to gently (and I stress, gently) reduce frequencies near ~300 hertz if it sounds too muffled.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#235

Post by jdfreefly »

CharlesW wrote: post #218
jdfreefly wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Amazon Chime? We are ridiculously aware of the latency issue in high quality voip. We do not at the moment support user generated keys the way Telegram does but we do use TLS/DTLS encryption end to end for our VOIP streams.

> We are ridiculously aware of the latency issue in high quality voip. We do not at the moment support user generated keys the way Telegram does but we do use TLS/DTLS encryption end to end for our VOIP streams. Any plans to make this available to developers as a service via AWS?

Sorry, I can't really comment on our roadmap and our priorities within it.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#236

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

The UI for trimming and setting the quality of sent videos is really neat. It's still annoyingly hard in 2017 to send videos from one mobile to another without needing to completely trash the quality via MMS or upload an often-gigantic file (captured in 1080p or higher) to an intermediary like YouTube or Facebook (and then wait for backend processing).

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#237

Post by doctorshady »

l1ambda wrote: post #217
torrent-of-ions wrote: post #121

I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will work but not always. But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, a…

The Opus codec ( http://opus-codec.org/comparison/ ) can enable very low latency audio. 26.5 ms algorithmic delay (the time it takes to go through the algorithm) by default, but can be set to a very impressive 5ms. Digital audio can't achieve the near no-latency analog POTS has, but it can get pretty darn close e.g. if Opus is used in the very low latency mode. I believe Mumble and maybe TeamSpeak let you choose the…

Just fyi, POTS is digital up until the very last mile. While the network is digital, it uses time multiplexed serial PCM streams under the hood. Aside from the delay imposed by fiber transmission at the trunk level (~40 milliseconds from one side of the US to the next. If you're using a long distance network that packetizes the connection or sends a call on some weird route, that can certainly increase), the g.711 encoding delay should be fixed at 0.125 milliseconds.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#238

Post by dboreham »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #214
Animats wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best phone voice quality is still ISDN. Digital all the way to the handset, and rigidly clocked with fixed delay. Switzerland has ISDN phones, and the voice quality is impressive.

ISDN was 64kbps pet channel though - and to my knowledge did not use a wideband voice codec by default (or at least didn't mandate all ISDN receivers support wideband audio). Lots of people who had ISDN kit plugged their old POTS phones into their TAs anyway.

I think it sounded good because it was clean 64K end-to-end. No trickery with transcoding a bunch of times along the way so someone could save a nanopenny.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#239

Post by thanksgiving »

backpropaganda wrote: post #216
hannob wrote: post #184

" Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network." Is i…

The 'neural network' is probably an SVM or logistic regression. There's nothing special that a neural network can learn with high-level features like network speed, ping times, etc. In fact, it's probably just a TCP-like algorithm, i.e. decrease rate of packet sending if not getting ACKs back. One day, Intel might come out and say their microprocessors are AI-powered, since it has branch prediction.

AMD already claims that with zen platform if I recall correctly.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#240

Post by samtoday »

backpropaganda wrote: post #216
hannob wrote: post #184

" Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network." Is i…

The 'neural network' is probably an SVM or logistic regression. There's nothing special that a neural network can learn with high-level features like network speed, ping times, etc. In fact, it's probably just a TCP-like algorithm, i.e. decrease rate of packet sending if not getting ACKs back. One day, Intel might come out and say their microprocessors are AI-powered, since it has branch prediction.

I think that Samsung beat Intel to it:

"Neural network spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 silicon brain (theregister.co.uk)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340348

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