4 ms·

Why stop at the 'AI's limit? We can do better than that. Keep going until a human can no longer recognise the image! (There's always a mechanical Turk to do the

Why stop at the 'AI's limit? We can do better than that. Keep going until a human can no longer recognise the image! (There's always a mechanical Turk to do the work.) And why stop when the image is unrecognisable? Why not translate the image of (say) a cat into an image of the word 'cat'? And if you've done that compression, take it a step further - translate the image of the cat into the text string 'cat'. Now you're getting seriously good compression ratios :)

shepherdjerred 4y ago
A long time ago I thought that this kind of compression could be interesting for voice chat/phone calls. Locally convert speech to text, send raw text over the wire, and convert text back to speech. You could fine tune some existing text to speech model to sound like you. Once you transfer that to your friends/frequent contacts you could have voice conversations over very low bandwidth channels. There are obviously plenty of caveats to this, like communicating sounds that aren’t speech. It could be a useful fallback e.g. if your network quality is seriously degraded then your client switches to TTS mode.
- namibj 4y ago
  There are speech codecs that essentially do this but with a phonetic encoding, instead of "normal" text. Yes, they are only used for extremely bandwidth-starved situations, but they do work. An example is Codec2, which works down to 0.7 kbit/s.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Well there's already speech-oriented codecs that can go down below a kilobyte per second, and there's this one that throws a neural net at the problem to help squeeze bytes: https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/08/soundstream-end-to-end-neural-audio.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/08/soundstream-end-to-end-neu... I don't think I've ever had a functional connection slower than that. You need packets to be making it through in a timely manner if you want a voice conversation, after all.
  - bigiain 4y ago
    > I don't think I've ever had a functional connection slower than that. I _may_ still have a 300 baud modem in a box in the garage. Possibly a 1200/75 one too. (1985 sometimes doesn't seem _that_ long ago...)
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Well, you could have just talked on the line that modem was using. That's not really the kind of limit I'm worried about.
- matthewaveryusa 4y ago
  Great idea! In fact look at what nvidia is doing with videocalls (spoiler exactly what you’re saying, but video) https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/10/05/gan-video-conferencing-maxine/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/10/05/gan-video-conferenc...
emmelaich 4y ago
Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity but reversed.

shepherdjerred 4y ago

A long time ago I thought that this kind of compression could be interesting for voice chat/phone calls. Locally convert speech to text, send raw text over the wire, and convert text back to speech. You could fine tune some existing text to speech model to sound like you. Once you transfer that to your friends/frequent contacts you could have voice conversations over very low bandwidth channels. There are obviously plenty of caveats to this, like communicating sounds that aren’t speech. It could be a useful fallback e.g. if your network quality is seriously degraded then your client switches to TTS mode.

namibj 4y ago
There are speech codecs that essentially do this but with a phonetic encoding, instead of "normal" text. Yes, they are only used for extremely bandwidth-starved situations, but they do work. An example is Codec2, which works down to 0.7 kbit/s.
Dylan16807 4y ago
Well there's already speech-oriented codecs that can go down below a kilobyte per second, and there's this one that throws a neural net at the problem to help squeeze bytes: https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/08/soundstream-end-to-end-neural-audio.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/08/soundstream-end-to-end-neu... I don't think I've ever had a functional connection slower than that. You need packets to be making it through in a timely manner if you want a voice conversation, after all.
- bigiain 4y ago
  > I don't think I've ever had a functional connection slower than that. I _may_ still have a 300 baud modem in a box in the garage. Possibly a 1200/75 one too. (1985 sometimes doesn't seem _that_ long ago...)
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Well, you could have just talked on the line that modem was using. That's not really the kind of limit I'm worried about.
matthewaveryusa 4y ago
Great idea! In fact look at what nvidia is doing with videocalls (spoiler exactly what you’re saying, but video) https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/10/05/gan-video-conferencing-maxine/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/10/05/gan-video-conferenc...

emmelaich 4y ago

Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity but reversed.