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Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

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Re: Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

#91

Post by andai »

hackmiester wrote: post #89
reaperducer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the pleasure of using a real landline just before the pandemic. Honest wire-to-wire connection between two ranches, so no silly VOIP steps between. It was fantastic. You don't appreciate how much latency is destroying our ability to communicate verbally until you go back to the old way. One example is arguing. It's no wonder people used to be able to argue with one another on a telephone. You could raise your v…

VoIP is definitely not the issue here. Codecs can be, and are, fast. I have no idea what cellular providers are doing to mangle the voice path so bad, but it certainly isn’t inherent to VoIP.

I thought the delay would be because VoIP uses packet-based communications rather than a direct connection.

Re: Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

#92

Post by TheRealSteel »

Aloha wrote: post #55
reaperducer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the pleasure of using a real landline just before the pandemic. Honest wire-to-wire connection between two ranches, so no silly VOIP steps between. It was fantastic. You don't appreciate how much latency is destroying our ability to communicate verbally until you go back to the old way. One example is arguing. It's no wonder people used to be able to argue with one another on a telephone. You could raise your v…

A cell phone tbh, is about the same latency as a landline in most end to end call circumstances. Latency only really is noticeable when better than 600ms. (And only a real problem over 1000)

Do you have a source for that? Gaming latency is noticeable in the ~100ms range, and humans are highly sensitive to small adjustments in speech.

I would've thought it would be closer to the 200ms range, but I don't have any data to support that.

Re: Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

#93

Post by amluto »

kixiQu wrote: post #52
rectang wrote: post #39

What I want to know is whether Lyra takes any longer to encode than the alternatives. Because as far as I can tell, nobody cares in the slightest about latency. Phone calls are getting to be like writing postcards to each other. Speak in a whole paragraph. Wait several seconds for the latency to clear. Then the other party responds with a whole paragraph, waits several seconds for the latency to clear... Improvements…

In the article, > This trick enables Lyra to not only run on cloud servers, but also on-device on mid-range phones in real time (with a processing latency of 90ms, which is in line with other traditional speech codecs). Does that not cover it?

That covers it, but 90ms sucks. Opus has much lower latency.

Re: Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

#94

Post by bentcorner »

reaperducer wrote: post #45
rectang wrote: post #39

What I want to know is whether Lyra takes any longer to encode than the alternatives. Because as far as I can tell, nobody cares in the slightest about latency. Phone calls are getting to be like writing postcards to each other. Speak in a whole paragraph. Wait several seconds for the latency to clear. Then the other party responds with a whole paragraph, waits several seconds for the latency to clear... Improvements…

I had the pleasure of using a real landline just before the pandemic. Honest wire-to-wire connection between two ranches, so no silly VOIP steps between. It was fantastic. You don't appreciate how much latency is destroying our ability to communicate verbally until you go back to the old way. One example is arguing. It's no wonder people used to be able to argue with one another on a telephone. You could raise your v…

I'm glad you bring up latency - I've experienced several second latency in discord and it's really terrible when it happens (diagnosed via side-channel). The worst thing is that the app does nothing to try to salvage the conversation and the app doesn't tell you it's in a degraded state, so you'd never know this was a problem.

Re: Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

#95

Post by domoritz »

bscphil wrote: post #79

I've just taken a minute to confirm what my ears told me in Audacity. Please have a look at this screenshot: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/Qma41RMzieQ6ZGdGem9rLxnxEL1... The Lyra version is clearly much louder. This is a serious problem and it borders on being reasonable to call it "cheating". It's well known in the audio biz that if you ask people to compare two experiences, and one of them is a bit louder than t…

Off topic but how do you put images on ipfs and what’s the advantage over e.g. Imgur?

Re: Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

#96

Post by cnorthwood »

andai wrote: post #91
hackmiester wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VoIP is definitely not the issue here. Codecs can be, and are, fast. I have no idea what cellular providers are doing to mangle the voice path so bad, but it certainly isn’t inherent to VoIP.

I thought the delay would be because VoIP uses packet-based communications rather than a direct connection.

Most landline networks are also digital now for exchange to exchange communications, so even those will be packet based

Re: Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

#97

Post by com2kid »

scotty79 wrote: post #24
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #10

When Google's announcement [1] was posted a few days ago, I listened to their samples and heard an odd effect in the "chocolate bread" sample (the video chat example) [1], which is not mirrored in this article. On that sample, I felt [2] that the Lyra version exaggerates the pronunciation of the phrase 'with chocolate' in a way that meaningfully differs from the speaker's original. It weakens the voiced 'th' to nothi…

"When a man looks for something beyond his reach ..." The word "looks" sounds completely wrong for me with Lyra. To the point of completely not understanding what this word is supposed to be (first example with your [1] link).

To me, "man" sounds like "lan", but "looks" sounds correct.

I actually listened to the Lyra version first, and thought the speaker said "when a lad looks for something beyond his reach"

Re: Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

#98

Post by bscphil »

domoritz wrote: post #95
bscphil wrote: post #79

I've just taken a minute to confirm what my ears told me in Audacity. Please have a look at this screenshot: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/Qma41RMzieQ6ZGdGem9rLxnxEL1... The Lyra version is clearly much louder. This is a serious problem and it borders on being reasonable to call it "cheating". It's well known in the audio biz that if you ask people to compare two experiences, and one of them is a bit louder than t…

Off topic but how do you put images on ipfs and what’s the advantage over e.g. Imgur?

Cloudflare are kindly hosting [1] a free HTTP gateway for the IPFS [2] network. So I can host an image myself on a server with IPFS, and Cloudflare will cache it for me. This is better than Imgur because the latter has been redirecting users to annoying "social" pages with ads instead of showing them the actual image, at least in some cases. I also can't be sure whether Imgur recompresses your uploads or not - I assume they usually do.

It's also more generally useful because I can host other files too, not just images.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/

[2] https://ipfs.io/

Re: Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

#99

Post by Causality1 »

rectang wrote: post #39

What I want to know is whether Lyra takes any longer to encode than the alternatives. Because as far as I can tell, nobody cares in the slightest about latency. Phone calls are getting to be like writing postcards to each other. Speak in a whole paragraph. Wait several seconds for the latency to clear. Then the other party responds with a whole paragraph, waits several seconds for the latency to clear... Improvements…

Providers just don't seem to care. My internet connection is a hundred times faster than it was in 2004 but I'm still playing games with the same 50ms-60ms of lag. Sure the speed of electrical signals in wire is a good chunk of it but there's still so much room for improvement.

Re: Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate

#100

Post by ksec »

rectang wrote: post #39

What I want to know is whether Lyra takes any longer to encode than the alternatives. Because as far as I can tell, nobody cares in the slightest about latency. Phone calls are getting to be like writing postcards to each other. Speak in a whole paragraph. Wait several seconds for the latency to clear. Then the other party responds with a whole paragraph, waits several seconds for the latency to clear... Improvements…

Discussed a few days ago [1] Copying my comment here

Even 3G AMR, I think that was pre 2000 Speech Codec started at 5Kbps. With a latency of only ~20ms. If I am reading correctly the encode due to ML nature would take at least 40ms and up to 90ms for Lyra.

I am sure there are some specific usage that would be a great use case. But for most consumer consumption I cant think of one on top of my head. One should also be aware of the current roadmap in 5G and the on going work in 6G. We still have a long way to go in maximising bandwidth / transfer per capita. i.e More bandwidth for everybody.

It seems to be the case with ML they want to take these speech codec to new low bitrate. While it is fun doing it as a research, I much rather they push the envelop of at least 6 / 8Kbps if not even higher closer to perfection with even lower latency ( 10ms if not lower ).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26279891

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