The pandemic has caused the world needed to reinvent itself, and education saw the internet as the only way to avoid having to stop classes and activities. Many professionals also started working from home, and not everyone has exceptional internet quality at home. That's why Google Duo is getting a new codec that promises more stability in video calls, without sacrificing quality during broadcasts.
Lyra Codec Uses AI to Improve Calls in Over 70 Languages
The Lyra codec is the result of extensive artificial intelligence research by the Mountain View giant. This new codec was trained with hours of audio in over 70 languages and received fine-tuning by humans to work well with compressing and recreating voices during a call. The new feature is capable of transmitting clean audio in video conferences while weighing very little. This is because Lyra does not actually compress the sound and transmit it in large packets, but rather cuts out crucial information about speech attributes every 40 milliseconds, sends it to the recipient in a small packet — containing only numerical information about the audio recreating process — and then, on the other end, the algorithm takes charge of recreating the voice packet.
The model, however, is not new, and one of its main advances is the reduction of external noise, as it focuses on the experience of recreating speech. Google's biggest victory with Lyra is in the agility of packet transmission given their reduced size. On the company blog The potential of the new Google Duo codec is demonstrated with different samples, which with a demonstration compressed at 3 Kbps managed to offer cleaner audio than other codecs at much higher bitrates.
Therefore, the company is already distributing the update for its video calling tool. The Mountain View company has also stated that it will improve Meet conferences in the coming months, which is very important in times of pandemic when not everyone can enjoy broadband with high speeds and good stability. The new Google Duo codec — together with the powerful AV1 for videos — is designed to secure calls even on 56 Kbps connections.
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