Google has divulged Lyra, new technology that permits Duo, and soon other applications, to offer natural-sounding voice chat with just 3 kilobytes each second of network bandwidth.
Update: Google has now made Lyra open source for other applications to utilize.
With so many of us still unable to visit with loved ones, video calling applications have assumed a key role in keeping us all connected with each other, with Google Duo and Meet hosting more than 1 trillion minutes of video a year ago alone. In any case, this has likewise put a significant strain on internet infrastructure all throughout the world, and most video calling methods inside and out prohibit anybody with a low-grade internet connection.
To assist with this, Google has developed a new audio codec considered Lyra that is explicitly streamlined to offer conspicuous, justifiable, and characteristic sounding human discourse in as little of a space as could be expected. As clarified on the Google AI Blog, this was finished with the help of an AI model, which was prepared on “thousands of hours of audio with speakers in over 70 languages” to guarantee Lyra could be usable by whatever number individuals as could be expected under the circumstances. All the more critically, Lyra is sufficiently productive to have the option to run on anything from a very good quality cloud worker to a mid-range cell phone with just 90ms of latency.
As can be seen — or rather heard — from the video above, Lyra offers sound that, while observably lower quality than a normally encoded recording, is distinctly recognizable as the speaker’s voice while figuring out how to utilize incredibly little data. There are some more examples of discourse in Lyra contrasted with other low-transfer speed sound codecs, over on the Google AI Blog.
Lyra will before long be getting its first certifiable use as it is rolling out now to Google Duo for Android, where the codec will be utilized for calls made on low-speed connections, with Google making specific note of dialup connectionsand country regions in India and Brazil only offering a 2G network connection. From that point, Google intends to deliver Lyra as open source, allowing other companies to offer low-transfer speed Lyra sound in their own applications.
