Google has unveiled Lyra, a new technology that allows Duo, and soon other apps, to offer natural-sounding voice chat with as little as 3 kilobytes per second of network bandwidth.
Update: Google has now made Lyra open source for other apps to use.
With so many of us still unable to visit with loved ones, video calling apps have played a key role in keeping us all connected to one another, with Google Duo and Meet hosting over 1 trillion minutes of video last year alone. However, this has also put a major strain on internet infrastructure around the world, and most video calling methods outright exclude anyone with a low-grade internet connection.
To help with this, Google has developed a new audio codec called Lyra that is specifically optimized to offer recognizable, understandable, and natural-sounding human speech in as small of a space as possible. As explained on the Google AI Blog, this was done with the assistance of a machine learning model, which was trained on “thousands of hours of audio with speakers in over 70 languages” to ensure Lyra could be usable by as many people as possible. More importantly, Lyra is efficient enough to be able to run on anything from a high-end cloud server to a mid-range smartphone with only 90ms of latency.
