Aside from the seriously impressive WaveNet based results, I think the article doesn't do the codec itself enough justice. I mean, low-bitrate speech codecs ha

Aside from the seriously impressive WaveNet based results, I think the article doesn't do the codec itself enough justice. I mean, low-bitrate speech codecs have been around for some time (hey, vocoders are the oldest kind of audio codecs in history!), and I grew skeptical when they started to compare with mp3 and opus. But looking at this page Codec2 really holds its own when compared to AMBE and especially MELP, two of the most prominent ultra low-bandwidth speech codecs used today: https://www.rowetel.com/?p=5520 https://www.rowetel.com/?p=5520