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

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.