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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

#181

Post by qayxc »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #90
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 spent the last year and a half living about as far from my home city as possible (Melbourne > Edinburgh) (Currently in quarantine) and the latency of phone calls drives me nuts . The huge gaps between people speaking, and the complete change in conversation flow since you have to speak in huge continuous paragraphs. The constant "go ahead" , "no you go" etc... Ugh. But I agree with you... nobody seems to care excep…

> Melbourne > Edinburgh

Well, there's part of your problem right there. No need to even mention Bluetooth or device-related delays.

South Australia to North Britain is the better part of literally half way across the globe. It's either 64000 km at lightspeed (via satellite) or roughly 35000 km via optic fibre cable at 60% lightspeed (e.g. equivalent to ~60000km at lightspeed).

That's 200 ms one way latency just from the distance alone (best case scenario, no less), so 400 ms of latency just from distance alone. Even with something like Starlink we'd still be talking about at least 100 ms latency.

The whole latency from wireless protocols and codecs are just the cherry on top.

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

#182

Post by qayxc »

Causality1 wrote: post #99
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.

> but I'm still playing games with the same 50ms-60ms of lag

What kind of lag, though? Input lag has actually gone up in the past 15 years (e.g. due to displays and USB device polling). These things add up quickly and it doesn't even have to be just the network that introduces lag.

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

#183

Post by drudu »

peterhil wrote: post #179

I find the glitches in Lyra codec very unpleasant compared to the other codecs. They remind of the visual glitches of AI generated images, and I really hope Lyra does not become a common codec!

To clarify, do you find Lyra @ 3kbs to be more unpleasant overall than Speex at @ 3kbps?

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

#184

Post by qayxc »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #13
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…

Are the speech models sufficiently generic across all languages?

That remains to be seen. In my experience the performance with anything other than (US) English is mediocre at best and less common the language, the worse results get.

So while Spanish, French, or German might get there eventually, don't even try Polish, Czech, or Farsi (Persian) dialects.

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

#185

Post by sodality2 »

Miraste wrote: post #138
robmsmt wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also agree. Sometimes I speak to work colleagues who are on BT headsets and it must add what feels like 100ms to the call. I can sometimes hear the end of my sentence as I speak. Infuriating.

I don't understand how Bluetooth has made it this far for phone calls. It has two modes: unintelligible quality and bad latency, or decent quality and ludicrous latency. The entire standard is an advertisement for Airpods.

What platform are you on? iOS/android/windows/macos/linux?

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

#186

Post by drudu »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #157
walrus01 wrote: post #31

Microsoft also just announced a 6kbps advanced audio codec: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/...

And it sounds significantly better to me, which is expected since they use double the bitrate.

hn allows meaningless statements (as above) but bans calling anyone out for being dumb

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

#187

Post by qayxc »

IshKebab wrote: post #176
ddevault wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, with Codec 2 setting the gold standard, I don't find this very impressive. I find this more intelligible at one-third of the Lyra bitrate: http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts2a_1300.wav Codec 2 does a better job of isolating the parts of sound which are most necessary to intelligible speech, without necessarily caring too much about preserving the original qualities of the speaker's voice or environment…

It's definitely impressive but your ears are broken if you think that is more intelligible.

Or maybe they are visually impaired. I'm always impressed when I sit next to a blind person in a train and hear them using a smartphone.

The screen readers run at 2x normal speed (at least) and to my untrained ears the robotic noises just sound like a garbled mess instead of intelligible speech. The blind person using the phone, however, seems to have no problem understanding it. Fascinates me every time.

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

#188

Post by drudu »

vortico wrote: post #160

Why in the world do we need 3 kbps audio for voice? It's so hard to hear people speaking over mobile phones. Why don't we use 32-64 kbps 48 kHz for all voice communication? GSM CSD offers 9-14 kbps down/up, 3G offers 384 kbps, and EDGE offers 473 kbps. Why limit to 3 kbps?

if you can't answer the question yourself, you wouldn't ever be able to understand the answer. maybe i want to have two calls at once / maybe i have a shitty gsm/csd link / maybe we are transmitting over a link that has less than 10kbps bandwidth. asking this question implies you have no imagination or awareness beyond what you already know. i'll get banned from hn for this but goddamn you're a dumb person

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

#189

Post by regularfry »

mlyle wrote: post #80
regularfry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It covers it, but it's not exactly brilliant. 200ms is the point at which conversation breaks down. If half that budget has gone on the codec, not much has to happen on the wire for it to be noticeable.

If your 200ms number is round trip, 90ms + 90ms is more than half that budget.

It's not, that's mouth-to-ear.

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

#190

Post by LinuxBender »

motiejus wrote: post #8

Nothing about licensing or patents. I assume the worst (read: unusable for small businesses)? 10+ years ago I worked in a small voip shop, where we had very high quality (low jitter), but low bandwidth connection. I researched many codecs of the time (2010-ish). We liked speex, because it can be used "without strings attached". Also, I can choose the quality depending on the bandwidth. Although for low bandwidth g729…

I am curious about this as well. With all the debates in the threads here about this codec, I think it would be worth having the folks at Mumble [1] (murmur server) incorporate it as an option so people could fire up an instance and put it to the test. That of course only works if the license is compatible. They compare the performance to Opus which is used currently by Mumble.

[1] - https://www.mumble.info/

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