Google Announces Lyra V2 Low Bit-Rate Voice Codec

Last year Google announced the Lyra voice codec for low bit-rates that combined with the open AV1 codec could lead to voice chats on 56kbps connections. Lyra makes use of machine learning and other techniques for extremely low bit-rate speech compression that can function at 3kbps. Google last year open-sourced the Lyra code while today they announced the availability of Lyra V2.

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.

More details on Lyra V2 can be found via the Google Open-Source Blog and the code is available on GitHub. The GitHub release notes mention Lyra V2 can be ~5x faster on Android devices, codec latency reductions from 100 to 20 ms, and now there is Mac and Windows support to complementing the Linux and Android support.