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takyon writes:

Google Announces Lyra V2 Low Bit-Rate Voice Codec

Lyra V2 is summed up by Google as being "a better, faster, and more versatile speech codec...a new architecture that enjoys a wider platform support, provides scalable bitrate capabilities, has better performance, and generates higher quality audio."

Lyra V2 makes use of the SoundStream end-to-end neural audio codec, continues showing much better performance than the Opus audio codec, improved audio quality, and more. The Lyra V2 open-source code is available today.

Lyra 1.2.0 on GitHub. New features:

• Speed is significantly faster (~5x improvement seen on Android devices).
• The SoundStream-based model produces significantly higher quality speech (when comparing 3kbps V1 to 3.2 kbps V2).
• Selectable bitrate (3200, 6000, 9200 bits per second).
• Codec latency reduced from 100 ms to 20 ms.
• Mac and Windows support (in addition to continuing support for Linux and Android). Note: we have verified that these build, and run correctly, but have numerous compilation and linker warnings (Windows in particular due to MSVC/gcc mismatch). These issues and support for other platforms like iOS can be addressed by modifying the .bazelrc file. We welcome community contributions for this.
• More portable code: The TensorFlow Lite model in the .tflite files can be used in other platforms. The TFLite runtime is optimized for individual platforms, replacing the need to write platform specific assembly.

Lyra (codec).

Previously: Google Unveils Lyra Audio Codec with Better Speech Compression than Opus
Google Posts First Beta Code for Lyra Speech Compression Codec

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