3 ms·

Heya, please could you unpack your reasoning a little bit more? You said: > WhatsApp is already wildly popular in most of the developing world for mostly this

Heya, please could you unpack your reasoning a little bit more? You said: > WhatsApp is already wildly popular in most of the developing world for mostly this reason. I can't speak for the majority of the developing world, but here in South Africa, WhatsApp is indeed the predominant communications app. That being said, WhatsApp voice calls are also used here quite a bit. So with that in mind, and reading from the article: > Lyra compresses raw audio down to 3kbps for quality that compares favourably to other codecs To me 3kbps sounds pretty great, and might actually work out cheaper / better than one might imagine. So I'm just wondering, how does WhatsApp voice call data usage compare to Lyra? Also whilst South Africa is indeed a developing country (where, among other things, the price of data is proportionately high relative to average household income), the cellular network infrastructure is excellent. So I don't think the random bursts of connectivity you describe are as big of an issue here, whereas the price of data most certainly is. In which case, I can definitely see a market for Lyra (assuming the 3kbps is indeed vastly superior to WhatsApp's data usage for a voice call). Hope that makes sense but I'd be happy to extrapolate a little further :-)

londons_explore 6y ago
Lyra is a good candidate for replacing the protocol already used in Whatsapps voice calls. The binary size of Whatsapp matters, so it would depend on Lyra not requiring a multi-megabyte neural net too. The 40 millisecond extra enforced delay might have a negative impact on user experience. It might be a good candidate for use in the voice message feature of whatsapp. That feature doesn't require low latency audio, so there might be even better compression schemes that use forward and backward compression techniques.

londons_explore 6y ago

Lyra is a good candidate for replacing the protocol already used in Whatsapps voice calls. The binary size of Whatsapp matters, so it would depend on Lyra not requiring a multi-megabyte neural net too. The 40 millisecond extra enforced delay might have a negative impact on user experience. It might be a good candidate for use in the voice message feature of whatsapp. That feature doesn't require low latency audio, so there might be even better compression schemes that use forward and backward compression techniques.