As we already mentioned a little over a month ago, Google launched Lyra, its new audio codec, designed to enable audio calls at the highest quality, even through slow mobile connections.
To make it a universal codec, now Google has just shared the source code on the GitHub platform in beta version and under Apache 2.0 license. The idea is that the developers themselves can begin to implement it in their own communications applications.
Looking for the universality of the cdec
Google specifies that:
All code to run Lyra is open source under the Apache license, except for a math kernel, for which a shared library is provided until we can implement a completely open solution on more platforms.
In any case, the necessary tools are offered, although for now focused on the 64-bit Android ARM platform, with development in Linux, promising that they will expand the support for other platforms along with improvements and the expansion of the code base. .
For Google, while Lyra’s architecture is very similar to traditional audio codecs, with basically one part for encoding and one part for decoding, its new audio codec differs by using its generative modeling capabilities for reconstruction of the speech signal to high quality, whereas traditional codecs use digital signal processing (DSP) techniques.
In other words, Google’s new audio codec uses machine learning to reconstruct voice conversations.
Google expects high-quality calls to be produced even on slow mobile networks, not only in developing countries, but also in those territories where the exponential increase in demand has been able to congest mobile networks, as observed with the increase. teleworking and other online activities as a consequence of the confinement phases.
According to Google:
While Lyra compresses raw audio up to 3 kbps for quality that compares favorably to other codecs, such as Opus, it is not intended to be a complete alternative, but it can save significant bandwidth in these types of scenarios.
The company is already eager to see the implementations that will begin to be made from the developers thanks to the availability of the source code of the revolutionary audio codec, which will provide call quality regardless of the conditions in which they occur.
More information: Google
