Google open-sources the Lyra audio codec • Hacker News Board

Re: Google open-sources the Lyra audio codec

#141

Post by perryizgr8 » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 11:23 AM UTC

bilal4hmed wrote: post #104

I have been using Duo more for audio calls lately and the call quality has been excellent. Compared to WhatsApp its much much better which often times can mimic the sound quality of a regular phone call. Ive tested in the US and with my family in India, where the connection isnt the greatest

Huh, for me whatsapp calls are way better quality than duo. Wonder what causes such variations.

Re: Google open-sources the Lyra audio codec

#142

Post by bilal4hmed » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 11:42 AM UTC

perryizgr8 wrote: post #141

bilal4hmed wrote: post #104

I have been using Duo more for audio calls lately and the call quality has been excellent. Compared to WhatsApp its much much better which often times can mimic the sound quality of a regular phone call. Ive tested in the US and with my family in India, where the connection isnt the greatest

Huh, for me whatsapp calls are way better quality than duo. Wonder what causes such variations.

I'm using a variety of devices with similar results - pixel 4xl, windows, Linux with Firefox and chrome and chromeos.

Usually on wifi and sometimes tmo lte

my family in India is 90% of the time using lte

Re: Google open-sources the Lyra audio codec

#143

Post by ampdepolymerase » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

beagle3 wrote: post #135

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be curious how the court would interpret this. Just wait for the next high profile SEC shakedown.

That’s probably meant for another thread

I meant phone taps.

Re: Google open-sources the Lyra audio codec

#144

Post by peter_d_sherman » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 6:20 AM UTC

>"Lyra’s architecture is separated into two pieces, the encoder and decoder. When someone talks into their phone the encoder captures distinctive attributes from their speech. These speech attributes, also called features, are extracted in chunks of 40ms, then compressed and sent over the network. It is the decoder’s job to convert the features back into an audio waveform that can be played out over the listener’s phone speaker. The features are decoded back into a waveform via a

generative model.

Generative models are a particular type of

machine learning model

well suited to recreate a full audio waveform from a limited number of features. The Lyra architecture is very similar to traditional audio codecs, which have formed the backbone of internet communication for decades. Whereas these traditional codecs are based on digital signal processing (DSP) techniques, the key advantage for Lyra comes from the ability of the generative model to reconstruct a high-quality voice signal."

PDS: Audio Codec meets Machine Learning! I love it!!!

Re: Google open-sources the Lyra audio codec

#145

Post by throwaway81523 » Fri, Apr 09, 2021, 6:33 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #88

throwaway81523 wrote: post #84

Another reason for end-to-end speech encryption: to keep your cleartext voice signal away from these overaggressive codecs changing the words. I can understand the need for a super low bandwidth codec on top of Mt. Everest, but 64 kbit PCM was good enough for our grandparents' landlines (or 13 kbit GSM for their mobiles) and it's good enough for us.

What a spectacular failure of imagination. Why change anything ever, right? I supposed dial-up modems were good enough for you too. Everyone is imagining that codecs like this will "change your words" but no-one has provided examples of that actually happening . I don't believe it.

Spectacular failure of imagination? I mean it's a speech codec, an incremental improvement over the many out there that work fine. We're no longer in a world where voice calls dominate the world's telecom bandwidth usage. We routinely receive a megabyte of Javascript and ads and crap to display a 288 character tweet. Soon there will be 5G everywhere, so we'll get 10MB of JS etc. to see the same 288 character tweet. 1MB is 10+ minutes of full-rate GSM, or a lot more than that of Opus. If Lyra is really free (no blobs) and its computational requirements don't make us churn our phone hardware yet again, then great, it can reduce the already very low cost of voice calls by another smidgen, increasing carrier margins while almost certainly not showing in lower prices to the end user. So at that end of things, it's tolerable, while it would be horrible if (say) it were patented and became a standard, so that FOSS VOIP clients became non-interoperable with what the big vendors were using.

Lyra is more transformative in some extreme niche areas of extremely limited bandwidth, say spacecraft radios or handheld satellite phones or whatever. Those applications already use super low bandwidth codecs that sound like crap. So Lyra won't really save bits, but it will help intelligibility a lot by sounding better in the same bits.